Japanese nationalism and geographical thought

There has been simultaneous emergence in many countries of the world of political disputes over aspects of national history in the 1990s. Geographical knowledge has political implications. Hence it is concerned with the formation of national identity as well as historical knowledge. This paper examines the relationships between Japanese modernisation and geographical thought, the characteristics of school textbooks and geopolitics in Japan during the Asia Pacific War, and recent disputes about views of history and the meaning of views of geography in the post‐Cold War era. Consequently, it is shown that the view of geography promoted the formation of national identity in the same way as that of history through geographical education and geopolitics. Taking the roles of geography into consideration, it can be said that an imaginative geography based on an ethnocentric view plays an important role in the time of rethinking national history. We should be aware of such an ethnocentric view of geography and make an effort to overcome differences in views between nations.     

How Do Ordinary Japanese Reach Consensus in Group Decision Making?: Identifying and Analyzing “Naïve Negotiation”

The purpose of this study is to investigate ways in which ordinary Japanese people negotiate in a multi-party meeting. We initially gave such a way of negotiation the tentative name of “naïve negotiation”. The analysis of the conversational data reveals three structural features of naïve negotiation: (1) at the utterance level, the participants tend to claim their opinions without providing any overt grounds, (2) at the local consensus-building level, they tend to jump to conclusions without the full examination of proposed hypotheses, (3) at the final consensus-making level, there tends to be disjunctions between discussion units. Although these features are not necessarily seen as irrational or illogical, a naïve-negotiation style can still be a trouble-source in achieving successful consensus-making. This leads us to emphasize the necessity of developing a support system for the discussants.     

Effects of the Reform of the Social Medical Insurance System in Japan

We estimate outpatient medical care demand functions and examine the effects of the 1997 reform of the medical insurance system. We focus on the issue of which persons have been most affected by the reform and on the extent to which price elasticities have changed since the reform. The estimation results show that the reform affected mainly dependants' demand for medical care, which implies that all members of the household shared the increase in the medical costs of the head of the household. Price elasticities ranged from −0.18 to −0.26 before the reform, and from −0.08 to −0.11 after the reform.
JEL Classification Numbers: C35, I10, I18.     

Voluntary Export Restraints and Economic Welfare

In this paper, we explore welfare implications of a voluntary export restraint (VER) agreement within a simple model of duopoly with product differentiation and conjectural variations. We assume that the foreign exporter does not sell its product in its own market and that the imposition of a VER makes the domestic firm into a Stackelberg leader. Under these assumptions, it is shown that a VER introduced at the free-trade equilibrium level of export is welfare-improving for the importing country if and only if the foreign exporter is forced to comply with the restraint involuntarily . In other words, it is impossible to benefit home country and foreign country simultaneously by a VER agreement within the class of models we are envisaging. This result holds irrespective of whether firms compete in terms of quantities or prices.     

Applying the Lessons of Asia: The IMF's Crisis Management Strategy following the Global Financial Crisis

ABSTRACT

The paper reviews the International Monetary Fund's (IMF's) non-concessional lending programs following the global financial crisis, with a view to understanding how the IMF applied the lessons of the Asian crisis in designing its approach to crisis management. For this purpose, the paper focuses on the 2008 programs in Hungary, Iceland, Latvia and Ukraine – the first of its kind since the early 2000s – and compares them with the 1997 programs in Indonesia, Korea and Thailand. Our analysis finds the European programs better funded and their structural conditionality more focused. Other than these, the overall thrust of the programs was similar: fiscal and monetary tightening, coupled with banking reforms. The real difference was not so much about content but about philosophy. Relative to the Asian programs, the European programs were characterized by more emphasis on ownership, greater collaboration among stakeholders, more realistic assumptions and greater transparency about the risks and the logic of policy actions, and more built-in flexibility of targets and policy options. This approach to crisis management incorporated the changes that had been made since the Asian crisis in the IMF's policies and procedures to manage capital account crises more effectively.     

Applying Matching Strategies in Climate Change Negotiations

This paper aims to apply game theory matching mechanisms to international climate change negotiations using numerical analysis in order to overcome the free-riding problem without a central authority. The analysis found that the mechanisms can increase the reduction by 2.5 times compared to the case without the mechanisms. It also demonstrates that coupling it with an emission trading scheme could reduce total abatement costs, and improve countries’ payoffs substantially. Matching mechanisms could be tabled in international climate change negotiations based on the conditional pledges which are currently proposed by the European Union and a few other countries.     

Corporate restructuring in Japan: Who monitors the monitor?

Peek and Rosengren [Peek, J., Rosengren, E., 2005. Unnatural selection: Perverse incentives and the misallocation of credit in Japan. American Economic Review 95, 1144–1166] showed that, when the bubble economy era ended, regulatory forbearance and perverse incentives allowed Japanese banks to engage extensively in evergreening. This is the first comprehensive study to empirically analyze the economics of private debt restructurings of financially distressed companies in Japan, where the corporate monitoring mechanism is not market based but large-stakeholder based – typically, banks and affiliated companies. These stakeholders are expected to efficiently resolve potential bankruptcy or collapse with better information resulting from long-term relationships with the distressed firms. Our study, however, finds that private restructurings led by them failed because of delays in implementing fundamental solutions. Forbearance in addressing the needs of distressed firms demonstrates the weakness of such stakeholders in instituting discipline, hence the need for a system to “monitor the monitor”.