Banks' asset portfolios changed significantly in the 1980s in Japan. This reflected the structural changes in corporate financing, namely, the shift from reliance on bank lending to capital market financing--the behavior particularly evident among large manufacturing firms--against the...

Japan has continuously run a current-account surplus since fiscal 1981, though the rise of the surplus has fluctuated widely. The ratio of current-account surplus to GDP expanded rapidly in the first half of the 1980s, reaching 4.4 percent in fiscal 1986. It then declined to 1.3 percent in...

During fiscal 1995, wholesale prices and corporate service prices continued to fall, while consumer prices remained rather stable. During the first half of the fiscal year, the pace of decline in wholesale prices quickened somewhat, reflecting the rapid appreciation of the yen and the pause in...

In recent years, concern about the accuracy of price statistics has risen in industrialized countries where the statistical bias in price indexes seems to have grown significantly while actual prices have generally been stable. The Bank of Japan has worked to improve the accuracy of its...

This paper empirically analyzes the relationship between monetary aggregates and economic activities in Japan using actual data and focusing on long-term equilibrium relationships. Long-term time-series data from the 1960s to 1996 are used in the analysis in order to observe long-term...

Corporate earnings have been greatly increasing in Japan since FY 2002 as business conditions continue to recover. This ongoing improvement in corporate earnings has the following distinctive characteristics: (a) earnings have risen to a high level across a wide range of industries; (b) fixed...

The CGPI focuses on the prices of goods bought and sold by companies. The Bank of Japan (BOJ) compiles three Basic grouping indexes: Domestic Corporate Goods Price Index (DCGPI), Export Price Index (EPI) and Import Price Index (IPI). Each Index is calculated to aggregate affiliated sample prices...

Private consumption has been slowly recovering since around the year 2000. This recovery gradually became clearer from the second half of 2003, and its pace is now steadily increasing. The present expansion phase that began from early 2002 reached four years and three months in April 2006,...

The Corporate Services Price Index (CSPI) has been rebased, which means the index has been re-referenced from 2000 = 100 to 2005 = 100. The weighting structure of the index is updated to reflect recent information on the relative importance of service products and the businesses that supply...

The Flow of Funds Accounts (FFA) provide a record of the financial transactions and the consequent claim/debt in the separate economic agents within our economy, such as households, enterprises and the government. These accounts are suitably designed to give a comprehensive overview of Japan's...