Emerging from ten years of post-bubble recession, the Japanese business and economic system will need to enter a period of radical restructuring in order to return to the growth of former years and maintain its influential position in the development of new technologies. Japan's choices for the future will have a major impact on its global trading partners. In this edited collection of papers, an international range of contributors discuss the fundamental issues faced by the Japanese business and economic system from historical, analytical and empirical perspectives. Their conclusions combine to present a view of the path Japan should take to restore its economy to optimal growth in the 21st century, and show how this path will affect global markets.

The book describes the structure of Keynes-Leontief Model (KLM) of Japan and discuss how the Japanese economy could overcome the long-term economic deflation since the mid-1990s. The large scale econometric model and its analysis have been important for planning several policy measures and examining the economic structure of a country. However, it seems that development and maintenance of the KLM would be very costly. The book discusses how the KLM is developed and employed for the policy analyses.

This innovative work demystifies the Japanese economy by considering it as a strategic system. Showing how the Japanese “miracle†is actively planned, directed, and implemented by a constellation of institutions, government policymakers, and big business, Huber argues that Japan, Inc., can best be compared to a modern military system rather than exclusively to a free-market economy. The author highlights particularly the similarity between Japan’s strategic economy and some of the structures and policy dynamics of the U.S. military and shows how Japans economic strategies have the capability of adversely affecting its trading partners.

During the rapid growth period of the Japanese economy, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, the economic system that became entrenched in Japan -- the so-called Japanese-style capitalism -- was based on the government-business-bureaucracy triad. Although its distinct features survived the subsequent two decades of slow growth, there are many indications that the Japanese economy is once again struggling to transform itself. These translations from the Japanese economic literature expertly address this transformation.

At the start of the twenty-first century, the Japanese financial system is undergoing a major transformation. This process is spurred by a sense of crisis. Dominated by large institutions, the Japanese banking system has suffered from serious problems with non-performing loans since the early 1990s, when the Japanese stock market and urban real estate market both crashed. Delays in responding to these twin asset bubbles, by both regulatory authorities and the banks themselves, made matters worse and led to a banking crisis in late 1997 and early 1998. Not anticipating this setback, in late 1996 the Japanese government inaugurated its Big Bang of comprehensive financial deregulation designed to complete the process of creating `free, fair, and open financial markets'. Beginning in late 1998 and early 1999 the government finally embarked on a major rehabilitation of the Japanese banking system, including making available some Yen 60 trillion (approximately USD 500 billion) of government funds to recapitalize fifteen major banks, adequately fund the deposit insurance program, and write off the bad loans of nationalized or bankrupted banks. One result of this reform process is that the Ministry of Finance (MOF), which dominated Japanese financial system policy for most of the post-war period, has been stripped of most of its former regulatory powers. The purpose of this book is to describe, analyze, and evaluate the process that is transforming the Japanese financial system. The chapters address various issues relating to the transition of the Japanese financial system from a bank-centered and relationship-based system to a competitive market-based system. Questions taken up include: Why did Japanese banks get into such serious trouble? Why has the MOF lost its immense power? How will the Big Bang's financial deregulation further change the Japanese financial system, including the huge government financial institutions and postal savings system? What are some of the broader implications of this transition? The book is divided into three parts: Part I considers the origins of Japan's banking crisis; Part II focuses on five particularly important areas of major actual and potential changes; Part III addresses the effects of the Big Bang, including its potential systemic externalities. Taken together, this book offers an unusually up-to-date, comprehensive and thorough appraisal and evaluation of the profound changes occurring in Japan's financial system.

While many Western economists forcefully urge the Japanese to become more like the US, there are other academics who have registered strong reservations to such a simplistic solution. In this volume, noted scholars take opposing positions on key issues including financial reform, corporate change and international trade. The editor contributes a thought-provoking introduction which also presents an overview of the topic. The papers gathered here present an opportunity for readers to consider the underlying conflicts in Japan's economy and society that makes choosing a new direction such a difficult proposition.

This book presents an evaluation of the impacts of megathrust earthquakes and tsunamis on regional economies and subsequent reconstruction, as well as regional revitalization by the spatial economic model and dynamic macro and regional computable general equilibrium (CGE) models. The cases examined are the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Indian Ocean Tsunami. The study constructs three models of these megathrust earthquakes and the associated tsunami. In the first model, the regional CGE model is proposed with a database comprising the two-regional social accounting matrix for 2005 between the region comprising four disaster-affected prefectures of Japan and the non-disaster region. For the recursive dynamic regional CGE model, the model that expanded and improved the dynamic two-regional CGE model to reflect the incomplete employment conditions and the aging society is used to analyze the impacts of an earthquake and the construction of industrial clusters. In the second model, the interregional input–output model is proposed in order to analyze the impacts of the earthquake and rapid population decline and construction of a biogas electricity power plant. In the third model, a new economic geography (NEG) model is proposed, consisting of the 47 prefectures of Japan in order to investigate the impacts of the Great East Japan and Nankai megathrust earthquakes and the associated tsunami and to consider how they change the regional economies of Japan. Using these three models, the impacts of megathrust earthquakes and tsunamis on regional economies and reconstruction and on regional revitalization are evaluated.