Expansion abroad and jobs at home: Evidence from Japanese multinational enterprises

This paper examines the so-called ‘exporting job’ hypothesis – that expansion of overseas operations of manufacturing multinational enterprises (MNEs) reduces home employment – using a newly constructed matched parent-affiliate panel dataset of Japanese MNEs over the period 1991–2002. The results do not support the widely held view that overseas operations of MNEs lower home employment. On the contrary, there is some evidence that expansion of overseas operations may have helped to maintain the level of home employment.     

International comparison in historical perspective: Reconstructing the 1934-1936 Benchmark purchasing power parity for Japan, Korea, and Taiwan

This article provides the first expenditure-based estimate of purchasing power parity (PPP) converters for 1934-1936 Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. We match all together 70-80 types of goods and services for private consumption, government expenditure and investment using three levels of weights derived from various expenditure surveys. We find that the 1934-1936 average prices of Korea for private consumption, investment, and government expenditure were about 0.86, 0.89, and 0.98 times that of Japan, respectively; and for Taiwan 0.84, 0.87, and 0.95, respectively. This gives the 1934-1936 Korea and Taiwan overall GDE average price levels of 0.87 and 0.86 that of Japan, respectively. Our new benchmark estimate is an improvement over existing converters based either on exchange rates or the 1990 backward projection method, which is embedded with index number biases. It provides a vital link for a long-term overview of structural change, ethnic income distribution, and the historical convergence for these three economies.     

全球国际收支失衡:中国视角

首先,我想讲一下:这是我的角度,而不能代表整个中国的角度. 对于全球失衡来说,我想失衡实际上是把两方面的问题合在一起了,一方面是美国的经常项目赤字,另一方面是亚洲的经常账户盈余.美国的经常项目赤字非常巨大,经常项目赤字的累积额也非常之大,这令人担忧.但是现在首要的问题不是我们要去战胜它,而是要问我们将来往哪儿走.     

The effects of ‘Gesell’ (Currency) taxes in promoting Japan's economic recovery

The traditional interest rate policy has lost its potency due to the zero-lower bound of nominal interest rates and the gradual accelerating deflation in Japan. Without stopping deflation, the Japanese government may face a rapid erosion of credit worthiness due to an uncontrolled budget deficit. In order to cope with this unusual situation, a non-traditional monetary policy measure is proposed. A negative nominal interest rate is needed to clear Japanese markets and can be achieved by levying a tax on all the government-guaranteed yen financial assets. This is a modified version of Gesell's stamp duty on currency for actual implementation in the contemporary context. The benefits and side effects of this tax for Japan are analyzed here.     

Is There a Trade-Off between COVID-19 Control and Economic Activity? Implications from the Phillips Curve Debate

In this paper, we argue that the roles of public policies concerning COVID-19 can be better understood in light of the past discussions on the Great Inflation of the 1970s and the 1980s. Like the Phillips Curve in macroeconomics, the pandemic presents a trade-off between economic activities and something undesirable, which is, in this case, infection. Like the Phillips Curve, this apparent output-infection trade-off is an elusive one and it is lost in the long run. Containing infections calls for decisive policy action. This paper shows that we could design a reaction function, which sets the level of economic activity as a function of the state of infection, in such a way that the possibility of an infection explosion would be eliminated. Our empirical analysis suggests that Tokyo, New York, and London since September 2020 do not satisfy this desirable property.     

Productivity dynamics in Japan and the negative exit effect

Previous studies on productivity dynamics in Japan have suggested that one of the reasons for sluggish productivity growth in the economy was that highly productive firms exit the market, giving rise to a negative exit effect. This study is the first using census data and a large-scale micro data set to verify the negative exit effect in Japan. We conduct analyses of productivity dynamics using the micro data. The results show that there is indeed a negative exit effect in Japan and that this is driven mainly by the exit of a small number of highly productive firms.