This book analyzes issues related to economic challenges for Japan’s regional revitalization. Japan’s responses to such challenges and to the problem of an aging population are of deep interest to the nations outside of Japan. This book brings together 19 articles contributed by Japan’s leading scholars, originally prepared for an online policy information portal, SPACE NIRA launched by the Nippon Institute for Research Advancement (NIRA) with Dr. Tatsuo Hatta, President of the Asian Growth Research Institute, as its General Editor. This book is a significant and useful reference for all scholars, students, and individuals with an interest in current policy issues in Japan.

This book analyzes issues related to economic challenges for Japan?s regional revitalization. Japan?s responses to such challenges and to the problem of an aging population are of deep interest to the nations outside of Japan. This book brings together 19 articles contributed by Japan?s leading scholars, originally prepared for an online policy information portal, SPACE NIRA launched by the Nippon Institute for Research Advancement (NIRA) with Dr. Tatsuo Hatta, President of the Asian Growth Research Institute, as its General Editor. This book is a significant and useful reference for all scholars, students, and individuals with an interest in current policy issues in Japan.

Japan's regional geoeconomic strategy -- Foreign economic policy, domestic institutions and regional governance -- Geoeconomics of the Asia-Pacific -- Transformation in the Japanese political economy -- Trade and investment : a gradual path -- Money and finance : an uneven path -- Development and foreign aid : a hybrid path.

This book discusses Japan’s long-term economic recession and provides remedies for that recession that are useful for other Asian economies. The book addresses why Japan’s economy has stagnated since the bursting of its economic bubble in the 1990s. Its empirical analysis challenges the beliefs of some economists, such as Paul Krugman, that the Japanese economy is caught in a liquidity trap. This book argues that Japan’s economic stagnation stems from a vertical “investment–saving” (IS) curve rather than a liquidity trap. The impact of fiscal policy has declined drastically, and the Japanese economy faces structural problems rather than a temporary downturn. These structural problems have many causes: an aging demographic (a problem that is frequently overlooked), an over-reliance by local governments on transfers from the central government, and Basel capital requirements that have made Japanese banks reluctant to lend money to start-up businesses and small and medium-sized enterprises. This latter issue has discouraged Japanese innovation and technological progress. All these issues are addressed empirically and theoretically, and several remedies for Japan’s long-lasting recession are provided. This volume will be of interest to researchers and policy makers not only in Japan but also the People’s Republic of China, many countries in the eurozone, and the United States, which may face similar challenges in the future.

Have Japan's relative economic decline and China's rapid ascent altered the dynamics of Asian regionalism? Peter Katzenstein and Takashi Shiraishi, the editors of Network Power, one of the most comprehensive volumes on East Asian regionalism in the 1990s, present here an impressive new collection that brings the reader up to date. This book argues that East Asia's regional dynamics are no longer the result of a simple extension of any one national model. While Japanese institutional structures and political practices remain critically important, the new East Asia now under construction is more than, and different from, the sum of its various national parts. At the outset of a new century, the interplay of Japanese factors with Chinese, American, and other national influences is producing a distinctively new East Asian region.

This study provides a broad political and economic examination of the impact of the silk trade on nineteenth-century Japan. It analyzes the economic role of Japan’s eastern interior region and that of the port of Yokohama. It argues that the economic development in this period laid the foundations for Japan’s prewar industrial development in the late nineteenth century and was largely responsible for the integration of Japan into the global economy.

Explores the politics and economics of the Abe government and evaluates major policies, such as Abenomics policy reforms.