Significant aging is projected for many high-saving emerging economies of East and Southeast Asia. By 2025, the share of the elderly in their populations will at least double in most of these countries. The share of the young will fall. Aging populations could adversely affect saving rates in these economies, particularly after 2025. For the world, one may observe that, initially, the Asian Tigers could become increasingly important for world savings, reflecting their increased weight in the world economy, their high saving and growth rates, and the aging of the industrial countries. After 2025, the aging of the Tigers may reinforce the tendency toward a declining world saving rate.

This paper reviews and analyzes broad developments and considers specific policy measures to foster saving. The chapter also describes trends in national saving rates of industrial countries in recent years and briefly discusses the prospects over the medium term. The paper also discusses the effects of policy measures on national saving and investment. Fiscal, monetary, and exchange rate policies are all shown to have major implications for saving in developing countries. Fiscal restraint is especially important, since it increases national saving by both raising public saving and reducing the country's dependence on foreign borrowing. Exchange rate devaluation and the unification of exchange markets also appear to be effective in stimulating national saving. Interest rates and financial reforms play a crucial role in effecting an efficient allocation of resources, including the mobilization of savings to finance domestic investment.

In the autumn of 1990 there was a sense of change taking place in the world economy. Readiness for war was occurrin~ in the Middle East and a recession was already underway in a few major countries. The forces of reform and political re-shaping were visible in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. We economists, gathering in Osaka, Japan, under the auspices of the International Institute for Advanced Studies (Kyoto) could recognize that the Cold War was over and that politico-economic restructuring would take place among the powers in the Warsaw Treaty Organization. Much has happened since the latter part of 1990 to affect international economic stability. The events of that period were both positive and negative for economic stability, but our concern was weighted towards the negative side. Dur charge and sponsorship was scholarly, and the papers from the learned contributors to the symposium and this resulting volume used the many tools of economic analysis to try to understand the ongoing developments. In the intervening period, while this volume was being prepared and edited, we did not cnange our viewpoints in any fundamental way, and we can take satisfaction in the way our symposium either relates to the unfolding sequence of events in a substantive sense or provides a framework in which to study these events.

First published in 1999, this guide to the G7/G8 system discusses the origins, characteristics, role and agenda of the G7/G8 system; reviews its evolution; surveys the major debates and questions about the G7/G8; and provides a detailed study of its complex and elusive documentation. It also includes a comprehensive bibliography, of the G7/G8 and its concerns, listing over 600 books, shorter writings, publications in series, book chapters, articles in periodicals, government publications, international organisation publications and Internet resources. The book is intended as a contribution to scholarly literature and as a useful work of reference for academics, government officials, the media, libraries and the general public.

Population aging raises a number of issues regarding the optimality of public debt policy and the systems of public pension provisions that are in use in developed countries. The studies in this book address these questions using computable general equilibrium models. They give illuminating insights and new empirical estimates of future prospects of pay-as-you-go pension schemes in the "big seven" OECD countries, the possible distortions introduced by the pension systems in four large European economies, the effects of lifetime uncertainty in analyzing a potential reform of the Dutch pension system, effects of increasing international mobility of financial capital to pension policies, and public debt reduction policies in relation to possible adverse effects of taxation on wage formation and unemployment.

Japan's economy stumbled in the 1990s, after four decades of rapid growth that transformed Japan into a wealthy country at the world's technological frontier. This volume explores the forces that will drive structural and institutional change in Japan over the next decade.