Did Japan's shopping coupon program increase spending?

In March 1999, 31 million “shopping coupons” worth 20,000 yen each were distributed to Japanese families with children and to the elderly. The coupons expired after six months and could only be used within the recipient's local community. We use variation in the number of children across families and in the number of recipients across prefectures to measure the effect of the coupons on spending. We find that coupons had a positive effect on spending on semi-durables, but no effect on spending on nondurables or services. The marginal propensity to consume on semi-durables was 0.1–0.2 when the coupons were distributed in March. The results using regional variation provide stronger evidence that spending did not fall after the coupons had been redeemed.     

Total‐Factor Energy and Emission Efficiencies of ASEAN and Other Asian Economies

This research uses the slack‐based measure data envelopment analysis to compute the energy and emission efficiencies of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and other Asian economies during the 2001–2017 period, employs the Malmquist productivity index to check for the main source of efficiency score changes due to technical changes, and then applies panel Tobit regressions to determine the factors explaining the efficiencies. Our empirical results show that the energy efficiency scores of ASEAN economies had been catching up to other Asian economies after the Global Financial Crisis, whereas the emission efficiency scores of various ASEAN economies had been falling behind other Asian economies over the same period. The main source of efficiency score changes over time is efficiency changes and not technical changes. Decreases in the fossil fuel ratio of net electricity generation and the secondary industry ratio within total industry improve both lead to improvements in energy and emission efficiencies.     

Effectiveness of harvest strategies in achieving multiple management objectives in a multispecies fishery

Fisheries management is characterised by multiple objectives, some of which may be complementary, while others may require trade‐offs between outcomes. Balancing these objectives is made more complex in the case of multispecies and multigear fisheries. In this paper, we develop a bioeconomic model that captures the key elements of such a fishery to test a range of potential harvest strategies to provide insights into how economic target reference points could lead to both desirable and undesirable management outcomes (e.g. discards). The model is developed as a long‐run optimisation model to identify target reference points to achieve multispecies maximum economic yield, and a dynamic recursive optimisation model, which includes more realistic representation of fishers’ behaviour, such as discards and trading of under‐caught species quotas. The potential economic, social and ecological impacts are evaluated using data envelopment analysis (DEA). The results suggest that the use of proxy target reference points can result in short‐term economic benefits at the cost of slower stock recovery and higher discarding. Limiting the number of species subject to quota controls may also prove beneficial in multispecies fisheries, while ensuring quota markets are efficient is likely to produce benefits irrespective of the harvest strategy adopted.     

The influence of indoor air on personal exposure to volatile organic compounds and its risk estimation

This paper summarizes the results of personal exposure monitoring and estimates the risk from exposure to 18 volatile organic compounds compared with health criteria set by the US Environmental Protection Agency. In study 1, personal exposure levels and outdoor air concentrations were compared, and in study 2, personal exposure levels and the corresponding indoor air concentrations were compared. From these studies, it was concluded that personal exposure to volatile organic compounds depended markedly on indoor air quality and that handling of compounds increased personal exposure markedly. Risk estimations indicated that chloroform in tap water, benzene from cigarette smoke and p -dichlorobenzene from household insecticide needed caution.     

Aged-care support in Japan: perspectives and challenges

This article explores economic aspects of the market for long-term care (LTC) in Japan. As the world's most rapidly aging nation, it is of interest to understand that country's current LTC system and projections of LTC utilization patterns and costs, as well as their potential drivers. Since Japan appears likely to experience important shortfalls in LTC in the future, the authors also discuss alternate forms of provision.     

Estimating International Interindustry Linkages: Non-survey Simulations of the Asian-Pacific Economy

This paper evaluates a recently published semi-survey international input–output table for nine East-Asian countries and the USA with four non-survey estimation alternatives. A new generalized RAS procedure is used with stepwise increasing information from both import and export statistics as optimisation constraints on the four non-survey tables. The results show that the estimated table improves when increasing information from both sources is used, despite the well known inconsistencies between import and export data in trade statistics. It is concluded that the new procedure can be useful as a critical analysis of newly published (semi-)survey international tables and/or as an early updating tool during the construction process.     

Estimating the Markov-switching almost ideal demand systems: a Bayesian approach

Allias and Nichèle (Eur Rev Agric Econ, 34(4):517–538, 2007) proposed a Markov-switching almost ideal demand system (MS-AIDS) model by extending the idea of Hamilton (Econometrica, 57(2):357–384, 1989). In this paper, we propose a Bayesian estimation for MS-AIDS model and illustrate applicability of our proposed method. We then run two sets of simulation studies to confirm the validity of the proposed method. In the empirical study on the Japanese meat market, our Bayesian estimation improves the MSEs for all meat products over the ML estimation, while successfully capturing the regime shifts of meat demand coinciding with the timing of bovine spongiform encephalopathy cases in Japan and US.     

Welfare gain from quality and price development in the Japan’s LCD TV market

We estimate the welfare gain from innovations in the LCD TVs that prevailed during the period 2005–2007 in Japan, via consumer surplus that we measure with the aid of discrete choice methods, using market data obtained from an internet price comparison service (Kakaku.com). Further, by the measured implicit values of attributes, we evaluate in monetary terms, the qualitative transition embedded in the attributes through the iso-consumer surplus planes. We thereby disaggregate the welfare gain into the qualitative and the budgetary components, which we call the quality gain, and the budget gain, respectively. The estimates show, along with the evolved process of innovation, that the quality gain was in the order of 381 KJPY, while the budget gain was 94 KJPY negative, which gives about 287 KJPY of overall welfare gain per consumer, during the period.     

Economic Impacts of SARS/MERS/COVID-19 in Asian Countries

This paper surveys the recent literature on the economic impacts of SARS, MERS, and COVID-19, which Asian countries have experienced in the past two decades. In particular, we provide a detailed summary of how each of the past infectious diseases has impacted on the Asian economies and the extent of that impact. This paper also documents how the governments of Asian countries have responded to the COVID-19 shocks with their economic policies, and discusses the effectiveness of these economic policies to mitigate the COVID-19 shocks on their economies.     

Do TV-aided model lessons in class improve student performance? Evidence from public primary schools in Papua New Guinea

Lack of access to high-quality education remains a serious concern in many developing countries. This is especially the case for rural areas, including islands suffering from a shortage of skilled teachers and sufficient educational equipment. We examine the impact of introducing TV-aided model lessons in class to enhance the quality of teaching (the EQUITV project) on the national examination test scores of Mathematics and “Combined Subject” (a comprehensive subject comprising 30% science and 70% social studies and other topics) as well as English in the final year of primary education in Papua New Guinea. We employ a panel event study to capture the different timings of the intervention across schools over multiple time periods. We find that the project significantly and robustly improved test scores for girls only in English 3 years after the introduction of the project, but no improvement was seen for boys.