Developments of International Trade Theory offers the life-long reflections of a distinguished Japanese scholar who pioneered the application of general equilibrium theory to international trade. Written in a style that makes it easily accessible to scholars and students, the book combines standard topics on international trade with a discussion of the evolution of the theory and as well as recent discussions on topics such as immiserizing growth.

This book consists of two parts. Part I examines the historical progression of international trade theory, and Part II addresses...

This book investigates the reasons for persistent public deficits and delayed fiscal reform in Japan, placing a special emphasis on political economy aspects. Japan is confronted with the need to pursue fiscal discipline for fiscal consolidation and implement structural reforms for reorganizing fiscal expenditures. Focusing on particular policy fields including social security, female labor supply, public works, and intergovernmental transfer schemes, the book clarifies economic and political elements that have hindered effective steps toward these two goals. Facing population ageing and a...

This book aims to review the postwar interactions of Japan with Asia. The Japanese factory production system, kaizen, has been shared in Asia. This book collects more diverse topics from Japan’s interactions with China, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Hong Kong. Each chapter provides details on how the business, political, and cultural interactions enrich both sides.  The findings are then used to suggest the possibility of a de-facto Asian Community and Japan’s role in the present and  post-COVID-19 world.

With the advent of the widespread use of the Internet, however, the...

This book theoretically and empirically investigates the emergence of strong money demand in wartime Japan (1937–1945), its disappearance after the end of the war (1945–1949), and the reemergence of strong money demand in contemporary Japan (from 1995 to the present) in terms of the effects on fiscal activities and the price level. An augmented fiscal/monetary theory of the price level is constructed from a close examination of the strong money demand present in these periods. Then, profoundly puzzling phenomena such as mild deflation despite monetary expansion, low long-term interest...

This book integrates the economics of aging and insight based on political economy and explores generational conflict in the context of governmental spending. This problem is general, as the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted: lockdowns protect the elderly, but hurt the young. Policies to address global warming impose taxes on the elderly, but would bring benefits largely in the future. This book addresses intergenerational problems by placing its focus on budget allocation, taxation, and regulation. By using Japanese and US data, the authors conduct statistical analysis of whether regions...

This book explains how standard micro-founded macroeconomics is misguided and proposes an alternative method based on statistical physics. The Great Recession following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2015 amply demonstrated that mainstream micro-founded macroeconomics was in trouble. The new approach advanced in this book reasonably explains important macro-problems such as employment, business cycles, growth, and inflation/deflation. The key concept is demand failures, which modern micro-founded macroeconomics has ignored.

“It (Chapter 3) captures analytically a...

This book aims to report on a cutting-edge research project of the smart grid in Japan, resting on the three pillars of field experiments, behavioral economics, and big data. The field experiments on the smart grid were conducted in four regions in Japan—Yokohama city, Toyota city, Keihanna Science City, and Kitakyushu city—over a three-year period from 2012 to 2014 after the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, and the subsequent accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plants. Our focus here is on demand response in the smart grid environment, which we also discuss in the...

This book, focusing on the Japanese economy mainly from the 1990s to the 2010s, examines the Japanese industrial and fiscal-monetary policies and evaluates its achievements and limits from a historical perspective. Although the period that was also referred to as the "lost decade (or two, three decades)" was marked by various policy discussions, there are still few studies that summarize them as a history. Another unique feature of this publication is that it includes the contributions not only from researchers, but also from those who are/were in a position close...