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Japan has ambitious economic goals: 3 percent nominal growth; 2 percent inflation; and a primary budget surplus. Abenomics has employed the three arrows of monetary, fiscal and structural policies, but the goals remain out of reach. We propose that countercyclical measures be embedded in long-run frameworks that anchor expectations for inflation and public debt. In addition, we argue for an incomes policy to assist reflation. Model simulations suggest that, combined, these proposals would make headway towards the goals, with, on balance, a better chance of success than the more unconventional policy alternatives proposed by Krugman, Svensson, and Turner from a risk-return perspective.

Japan

International Monetary Fund. Asia and Pacific Dept

Published: 2017-08-01

Total Pages: 37


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This Selected Issues paper analyzes reasons behind low levels of private investment in Japan. Private investment in Japan not only appears low, but also seems to have underperformed relative to other advanced economies. Findings support the hypothesis that sectoral concentration (reduced competition) has had a significant negative impact on firm- and sector-level investment. Results point to potential benefits from decreasing barriers to entry, protection of incumbents, and market concentration in some sectors. Results also indicate that there is room for further reform in the gas and telecom sectors, and deregulation of professional services.
Reflecting the Past is the first English-language study to address the role of historiography in medieval Japan, an age at the time widely believed to be one of irreversible decline. Drawing on a decade of research, including work with medieval manuscripts, it analyzes a set of texts—eight Mirrors—that recount the past in an effort to order the world around them. They confront rebellions, civil war, “China,” attempted invasions, and even the fracturing of the court into two lines. To interrogate the significance for medieval writers of narrating such pasts as a Mirror, Erin Brightwell traces a series of innovations across these and related texts that emerge in the face of disorder. In so doing, she uncovers how a dynamic web of evolving concepts of time, place, language use, and cosmological forces was deployed to order the past in an age of unprecedented social movement and upheaval. Despite the Mirrors’ common concerns and commitments, traditional linguistic and disciplinary boundaries have downplayed or obscured their significance for medieval thinkers. Through their treatment here as a multilingual, multi-structured genre, the Mirrors are revealed, however, as the dominant mode for reading and writing the past over almost three centuries of Japanese history.
Bolder economic policy could have addressed the persistent bouts of deflation in post-bubble Japan, write Gene Park, Saori N. Katada, Giacomo Chiozza, and Yoshiko Kojo in Taming Japan's Deflation. Despite warnings from economists, intense political pressure, and well-articulated unconventional policy options to address this problem, Japan's central bank, the Bank of Japan (BOJ), resisted taking the bold actions that the authors believe would have significantly helped. With Prime Minister Abe Shinzo's return to power, Japan finally shifted course at the start of 2013 with the launch of Abenomics—an economic agenda to reflate the economy—and Abe's appointment of new leadership at the BOJ. As Taming Japan's Deflation shows, the BOJ's resistance to experimenting with bolder policy stemmed from entrenched policy ideas that were hostile to activist monetary policy. The authors explain how these policy ideas evolved over the course of the BOJ's long history and gained dominance because of the closed nature of the broader policy network. The explanatory power of policy ideas and networks suggests a basic inadequacy in the dominant framework for analysis of the politics of monetary policy derived from the literature on central bank independence. This approach privileges the interaction between political principals and their supposed agents, central bankers; but Taming Japan's Deflation shows clearly that central bankers' views, shaped by ideas and institutions, can be decisive in determining monetary policy. Through a combination of institutional analysis, quantitative empirical tests, in-depth case studies, and structured comparison of Japan with other countries, the authors show that, ultimately, the decision to adopt aggressive monetary policy depends largely on the bankers' established policy ideas and policy network.
In April 2013 the Bank of Japan launched an unprecedented quantitative and qualitative monetary easing policy. It was thought that a 2% price stability target could be achieved within 2 years; 4 years on and we are still mission incomplete. Mission incomplete! This phrase neatly captures the progress made by the Bank of Japan (BOJ) in reflating the economy. In April 2013, the BOJ launched an unprecedented quantitative and qualitative monetary easing policy. The BOJ was certain that the 2% price stability target would be achieved within 2 years. About 4 years later, the BOJ lags behind other major central banks, with actual inflation and inflation expectations still well below 2%. What happened? And what should the BOJ do next? This former policy maker's account expertly traces and analyzes the policy's consequences.
Modifications to Japan's monetary policy framework will be needed as positive inflation resumes because the current monetary regime and operations are tailored to ending deflation. The paper suggests that the monetary regime should move from an "anti-deflation" objective to an inflation objective, complemented by a shift of monetary operations from a quantitative operating target to an interest rate target. There are also questions about the timing of these shifts and the particulars of such arrangements, but decisive answers are elusive.
The Japanese Economy, 4th Edition is for anyone curious about economics, for it is impossible to appreciate economics without vivid examples of its application. This book is also for anyone broadly interested in Japan, for it is impossible to fully understand Japan without learning what basic economics has to say about it, which is much. To know Japan - or any country for that matter - is more than an ability to recite a litany of facts about its history, geography, institutions, and culture. Disciplined thinking is needed to organize the disparate facts into a coherent system that can be grasped whole. Modern economics is the academic discipline underlying this book. The book uses economics and explains it, but without presuming the reader has any prior knowledge of it. The main object of interest is Japan. It starts with Japan's economic history since the late sixteenth century through the twentieth century. It then addresses contemporary topics in Japan's economy, beginning with ones that require an economy - wide perspective - economic growth and the business cycle, exchange rates, and the balance of trade. The discussion then moves on to sectors of the economy: the public sector, industry and trade, the financial system, the labor market, and more. The chapters can be read in any order, but four threads run through all the chapters and link them: Japan's economic growth and development, Japan's integration with the world economy, government policies and their effects, and peculiar economic institutions and practices.
Heir to a conservative political dynasty, Shinzo Abe entered politics burdened by high expectations: that, in ruling Japan, he would change it fundamentally. In 2007, seemingly overwhelmed, he resigned only a year after becoming Japan's youngest postwar prime minister. Yet, after five years ofreflection and reinvention, he masterfully regained the premiership in 2012, and now dominates Japanese democracy as no leader has done before.Abe has inspired fierce loyalty among his followers. He has cowed Japan's left by pursuing an ambitious program of reflating the economy and strengthening the armed forces and national security establishment. And, on the international stage, he has staked a leadership role for Japan in Asia, aregion being rapidly transformed by the rise of China and India. Abe's stature has only grown in the age of 'America First': he has both taken steps to preserve an ironclad relationship with the mercurial US president, and has himself become an undisputed leader of the besieged world order.In The Iconoclast, veteran Japan-watcher Tobias Harris tells the story of Abe's meteoric rise and stunning fall, his remarkable comeback, and his unlikely emergence as a global statesman struggling to lay the groundwork for Japan's survival in a turbulent century.