The quality of aid has been a worldwide concern in the wake of September 11, 2001. On the other hand, Japan's massive amount of Official Development Assistance (ODA) to the Asian economies has been questioned by the Japanese people. The main objective of this paper is to overview the...

In this paper, we tried to examine empirically the constraints to monetary policy posed by the zero-lower bound on nominal interest rates. To evaluate numerically the views expressed on policy effectiveness, we run several policy simulations, making full use of the two different versions of the...

The Japanese economy has suffered from deflation since the mid-1990s. Despite the importance of overcoming deflation for policymakers and academics in Japan, there has been no recent research on what changes deflationary expectations in Japan. This study emphasizes fact-finding from a unique and...

This paper analyzes some of the reasons why Japan's savings rate rose in the 1990s. Both the savings rate and unemployment rate increased in the 1990s, but the growth rate of disposable income decreased in the latter half of the 1990s. The evidence implies that an increase in the savings rate is...

The purpose of this paper is to identify empirically the factors that have promoted or restrained the economic growth in developing countries, based on the well-known growth model called the two-gap model. The authors apply vector autoregressive (VAR) analysis to nine developing countries, to...

Considering the huge amount of debt, the Japanese government can no longer delay any fiscal reforms. Moreover, in order to cope with aging society, the Japanese government should carry out fundamental reforms in social security systems. So it is required to reveal how much reforms would improve...

Two Widely-used seasonal adjustment programs are U.S.Census Bureau's X-12-ARIMA and TRAMO-SEATS written b V.Gomez and A.Maravall. The program TRAMO-SEATS, in particular, has beenattracting a considerable attention of researchers concerned with seasonal adjustment in Europe. X-12-ARIMA and...

This paper evaluates the quality and efficiency of the at-home long-term care market in Japan, a market in which for-profit enterprises were allowed to enter after the introduction of the long-term care insurance in Spring of 2000. We take advantage of data from a unique self-conducted survey to...