Book Reviews

Barbara Harriss-White, India Working: Essays on Society and Economy.
Phillipp Schofield, Peasant and Community in Medieval England, 1200–1500.
Nicola Verdon, Rural Women Workers in 19th Century England: Gender, Work and Wages.
Jonathan R. Pincus and Jeffrey Winters (eds), Reinventing the World Bank.
Julie A. Charlip, Cultivating Coffee: The Farmers of Carazo, Nicaragua, 1880–1930.
Monica M. van Beusekom, Negotiating Development: African Farmers and Colonial Experts at the Office du Niger, 1920–1960.
Abdul Rahman Embong, State-led Modernization and the New Middle Class in Malaysia.
David M. Anderson, Eroding the Commons: The Politics of Ecology in Baringo, Kenya 1890s–1963.
Jan Breman and Gunawan Wiradi, Good Times and Bad Times in Rural Java: Case Study of Socio-Economic Dynamics in Two Villages Towards the End of the Twentieth Century.
Mario Rutten, Rural Capitalists in Asia: A Comparative Analysis on India, Indonesia and Malaysia.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:
David McDermott Hughes, From Enslavement to Environmentalism: Politics on a Southern African Frontier
Edmund Abaka, Kola is God's Gift: Agricultural Production, Export Initiatives & the Kola Industry of Asante & the Gold Coast c.1820–1950
David Hall-Mathews, Peasants, Famine and the State in Colonial Western India
Linda Whiteford and Scott Whiteford (eds), Globalization, Water and Health
Penelope Francks, Rural Economic Development in Japan: From the Nineteenth Century to the Pacific War
Him Chung, China's Rural Market Development in the Reform Era     

New Evidence on Initial Transition from Career Job to Retirement in Japan

The interval in time between leaving a career job and exit from the labor force is especially long for Japanese employees. We examine determinants of post‐career work arrangements from two perspectives: work status and the route to a second job. We show that these determinants differ between male and female workers and that the customary function of career employers to place their workers in a second job has declined since the middle of the 1990s.     

SOCIAL SECURITY REFORMS AND LABOUR FORCE PARTICIPATION OF THE ELDERLY IN JAPAN*

In the present study we examine how social security programs have affected the labour force participation of the elderly over the past 40 years in Japan. Using publicly available data, we construct incentive measures for inducing retirement, to ascertain actual changes in the generosity of the programs and to explore the impact of the reforms on the labour supply of the elderly. We show that the labour force participation of the elderly is significantly sensitive to the measures, and our counter‐historical simulations show that social security reforms since 1985 featuring reduced generosity have significantly encouraged the elderly to remain in the labour force longer.     

How Do People Cope with Natural Disasters? Evidence from the Great Hanshin-Awaji (Kobe) Earthquake in 1995

This paper investigates the coping strategies employed by victims of the Great Hanshin-Awaji (Kobe) earthquake in 1995. Using a unique household data set, we show that households that held a large amount of collateralizable assets before the catastrophe and were free from a binding borrowing constraint were able to maintain their consumption levels by borrowing. In contrast, households subject to a binding borrowing constraint before the disaster were unable to borrow to cope with the losses inflicted by the earthquake. On the other hand, both types of households relied on private transfers, depending on the extent of the damage.     

THE IMPACTS OF “SHOCK THERAPY” UNDER A BANKING CRISIS: EXPERIENCES FROM THREE LARGE BANK FAILURES IN JAPAN*

A bank failure can have various adverse consequences for clients; these adverse impacts differ depending on which bank takes over the failed banks’ operations. In this paper, we show how the new banks’ management strategies are important in mitigating the short‐ and long‐run consequences. We focus on the clients of three large failed Japanese banks and examine their responses in terms of increased bankruptcies and changes in market valuation after the banks’ operations were taken over. The results imply that the choice of “shock therapy” or “soft budget constraints” had dramatically different consequences in resolving the bad loan problems in Japan.     

OVERSEAS R&D ACTIVITIES AND HOME PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH: EVIDENCE FROM JAPANESE FIRM‐LEVEL DATA*

This paper investigates the impact of overseas subsidiaries' R&D activities on the productivity growth of parent firms using firm‐level data for Japanese multinational enterprises. Based on survey responses, we classify each overseas subsidiary's R&D as either ‘innovative R&D,’ which we hypothesize is likely to lead to the acquisition of foreign knowledge, or ‘adaptive R&D,’ which is more likely to lead to adaptation to local conditions. We find that overseas innovative R&D raises the parent firm's productivity growth, while adaptive R&D has no such effect. In addition, overseas innovative R&D does not improve the rate of return on home R&D.