From Judicial Sovereignty to Collective Democracy: The Development of J.R. Commons’ Perspective on Progressive Institutional Change

Abstract:

This article clarifies the significance of “collective democracy” in the works of John R. Commons by comparing it with “judicial sovereignty” in terms of its contribution to “progress.” We can thus answer two issues that Paul D. Bush does not clearly address: (i) what setup for policy formation contributes to progress and (ii) what is the role of economists within a collective democracy? Based on the comparison, the answer to the first question is collective democracy, and regarding the second question, the roles of economists as both economists and “institutional” economists are extrapolated.     

Price shocks in regional markets: Japan's Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923

Japan's Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the area around Tokyo and the country's main port of Yokohama. This article uses the earthquake as a case study to inform our understanding of the economics of disasters and the history of market integration. It seeks to test two main assumptions: first, that shifting demand and supply curves consequent on a disaster will have some impact on prices; and second, that any local changes in the disaster region are likely to be diffused across a wider geographical area. We make use of a unique monthly wholesale price dataset for a number of cities across Japan, and our analysis suggests three main findings: that price changes in the affected areas immediately following the disaster were in most cases reflected in price changes in Japan's provincial cities; that cities further away from the devastation witnessed smaller price changes than those nearer to the affected area; and that the observed pattern of price changes reflects the regional heterogeneity identified by scholars who have worked on market integration in Japan.     

Public health improvements and mortality in interwar Tokyo: a Bayesian disease mapping approach

Recent studies have found that modern water supply systems played an important role in mitigating the mortality risks in major US cities in the early twentieth century. Modern water supply systems were installed also in Japanese cities during the interwar period. This study examines how the modern water supply system in Tokyo City reduced mortality risks in the interwar period. By employing a Bayesian disease mapping approach with a block-level lattice dataset of Tokyo for 1930, we found that wider access to purified water through water supply systems played an important role in mitigating mortality risks during the study period. Our estimation results show that clean water accounted for approximately 41.3 and 34.9 % of improvements in crude and child death rates, respectively, between 1921 and 1937 in Tokyo.     

THE FORMATION OF CONSUMER INFLATION EXPECTATIONS: NEW EVIDENCE FROM JAPAN'S DEFLATION EXPERIENCE

Using a new data set, we investigate the relationship between the inflation experience and expectations of households in Japan, focusing on the post-1995 deflationary era. Our first finding is that inflation expectations increase with age. Second, we find that measured inflation rates also increase with age, although age and inflation expectations continue to exhibit a positive correlation even after controlling for the household-level inflation rate. Analysis suggests that the correlation between age and inflation expectations is driven largely by the correlation between cohort and inflation expectations, which we interpret to represent the effect of historical inflation experience on inflation expectations.     

Preparing for disaster: a comparative analysis of education for critical infrastructure collapse

This article explores policy approaches to educating populations for potential critical infrastructure collapse in five different countries: the UK, the US, Germany, Japan and New Zealand. ‘Critical infrastructure’ is not always easy to define, and indeed is defined slightly differently across countries – it includes entities vital to life, such as utilities (water, energy), transportation systems and communications, and may also include social and cultural infrastructure. The article is a mapping exercise of different approaches to critical infrastructure protection and preparedness education by the five countries. The exercise facilitates a comparison of the countries and enables us to identify distinctive characteristics of each country’s approach. We argue that contrary to what most scholars of security have argued, these national approaches diverge greatly, suggesting that they are shaped more by internal politics and culture than by global approaches.     

Why Has Japan Failed to Escape from Deflation?

Japan has failed to escape from deflation despite an extraordinary monetary policy easing over the past 4 years. Monetary easing undoubtedly stimulated aggregate demand, leading to an improvement in the output gap. However, since the Phillips curve was almost flat, prices have hardly reacted at all. Against this background, the key question is why prices were so sticky. To examine this, we use sectoral price data for Japan and seven other countries including the USA, and use these data to compare the shape of the price change distribution across the eight countries. Our main finding is that Japan differs significantly from the other countries in that the mode of the distribution is very close to zero for Japan, while it is near 2% for other countries. This suggests that while in the USA and other countries the “default” is for firms to raise prices by about 2% each year, in Japan the default is that, as a result of prolonged deflation, firms keep their prices unchanged.     

NUTRITION,CROWDING, AND DISEASE AMONG LOW-INCOME HOUSEHOLDS IN TOKYO IN 1930

This article employs a household survey of low-income working-class households conducted in Tokyo in 1930 to investigate nutritional attainment levels and the relationship between calorie intake and morbidity. We find that the daily calorie intake was 2,118 kcal per adult male equivalent, high enough to satisfy the energy requirements for moderate physical activity. Richer households purchased more expensive calories mainly by substituting meat and vegetables for rice. We find negative associations between morbidity and income and crowding, but no significant associations for nutrition, tentatively suggesting that income and crowding were more important for morbidity in 1930 Tokyo than nutrition.     

Endogenous growth cycles in an overlapping generations model with investment gestation lags

Summary. A simple overlapping generations model with investment gestation lags is constructed. The model shows that, if the technology is of the AK type with capital-deepening externalities, the existence of investment gestation lags always generates permanent cyclical fluctuations in the economic growth rate. The mean growth rate is shown to be positive if the external effect is strong. The model also shows that, if the production technology takes the Cobb-Douglas form, there exists a unique steady state in which the economy exhibits neither cyclical fluctuations nor long-run growth.Received: 3 July 2003, Revised: 3 December 2003, JEL Classification Numbers: E32, B13. Correspondence to: Akiomi KitagawaAkiomi Kitagawa, Akihisa Shibata: The authors would like to thank Yasushi Iwamoto, Kazuo Mino, an anonymous referee and seminar participants at the Macroeconomics Workshop for their helpful comments and suggestions. Financial support from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan is gratefully acknowledged.