New office technology and the labour process in contemporary Japanese banking

Japanese banks account for the top nine of the world's ten biggest banks. Rationalization has led to increased control of employees in the sphere of labour management. This article examines labour management and working conditions in relation to the introduction of new office technology.     

Disequilibrium dynamics with monetarist price expectations

In this note we sketch the main features of the dynamic evolution of a rationed equilibrium macroeconomic model in which prices and wages respond to excess demands and inflation expectations, and the money stock is endogenous. We postulate monetarist inflation expectations, i.e., expected inflation is assumed to be equal to the current percentage rate of change of the money stock. If the system is stable, monetarist inflation expectations are asymptotically rational.     

The systemic variables and elasticities in Alonso's general,theory of movement

This paper explores the theoretical underpinnings of interregional movement models generalized by William Alonso focusing on the systemic effects of origin supply conditions and destination demand conditions. It is found that although Alonso's theory is logically consistent in terms of regional aggregation and interregional migration accounts, in practice the elasticity estimation of the systemic variables is problematic. Unless the affinity term is broadly defined, the trends in the ratio of interregional to intraregional affinities, cast suspicion on the family of spatial interaction models because of the inseparability of distance from origin and destination characteristics, and spatial autocorrelation problem.     

Regional growth in postwar Japan

We show that a shift from light to heavy industries brought about the fast regional transformation from the Tokyo-Osaka bipolar system to the Pacific industrial belt system, and a shift from heavy to high-tech and service industries induced the second transformation to the Tokyo monopolar system. We also show that the recent development in telecommunications and transportation technologies tend to agglomerate knowledge-intensive activities in the core regions of Japan while dispersing mass-production activities to nonmetropolitan regions and overseas. This partly explains the recent renewed tendency of the increasing income differential between the core and peripheral regions.