1. Theme of the Paper and Problems Setup The changes in the world economy, especially the impacts of China's full entry into the international economic system are expected to be substantial. However, the disagreements about the scale of these changes are divided into two groups: the first argues...

The recent experience of deflationary recession in Japan has revived an interest in past episodes of deflationary recessions. This paper turns to one of such episodes in Japan, namely the Showa crisis of 1930-1931. The paper pays special attention to the "return to the gold standard controversy"...

This paper analyzes effects of accumulation of public capital on welfare in the transition to an aging Japan by applying a simulated general equilibrium growth model. We develop an 80 period OLG model, where the latest data of Japan has been used in order to make our results as realistic as...

Like other developed countries, Japan currently has been experiencing a rapid increase in medical care costs. It is one of imperative interests for the government to find an effective way of balancing the quality and costs of medical care. As of 2003, the Economic and Social Research Institute...

The relationship between the R&D and the productivity improvement in Japanese manufacturing firms is examined. Using more accurate and the more recent data on the individual firm's R&D activity rather than the data used in the previous research, we estimated a Cobb-Douglas production function,...

Although the Bank of Japan has recently (in 2003) conducted an expansionary monetary policy that targets the current accounts balance, additional monetary policies aimed at overcoming the deflationary situation may be necessary. No monetary vehicle to stimulate the economy under the "zero...

As a part of the study towards an improved methodology for current estimation of quarterly GDP, a Monte Carlo analysis on the methods of distribution and extrapolation is executed, taking an explicit account of the statistical situation in Japan. The performance of estimation methods is shown to...

We extend the "fundamentals model" of currency crisis by incorporating the currency substitution effects explicitly. In a regime of free foreign exchange markets and free capital movements the reserve (hard) currencies are likely to substitute for the local soft currency in agents' portfolia...

Providing universal access to the Internet has become an important policy issue; today the Internet is indispensable to political, economic, and social activities. On the other hand, as a result of the slowdown of the spread of the personal computer to the home and the speed-up of the spread of...

It is often argued that Japan's deteriorated banking sector continues to seriously affect its economy, but few empirical studies support that argument. Still, it is useful to examine the relationship between the weakness of the banking sector and Japan's low economic performance. In this study,...