This book offers the representative macro-econometric models and their applications for the Japanese economy in different development stages throughout postwar years up to the present. It presents a summary of three types of macro-econometric models and analyses: ? Social accounting analyses of national income and related indices ? following the tradition of C Clark, S Kuznets, R Stone and World Bank Development Reports; ? Inter-industrial and inter-regional analyses of the Japanese economy a la W Leontief and the CGE (computable general equilibrium) type of applications to Comprehensive Development Plans; ? Macro-econometric model building for the Japanese economy and its applications with a survey of various models in Japan including the historic Osaka University ISER (Institute of Social and Economic Research) model and present day Government models. As many Asian economies are going through the stages of development that Japan has experienced for the past few decades, to them and other developing countries this book will be extremely relevant as a reference for years to come.

Criticism of current Japanese macroeconomic and financial policies is so wide spread that the reasons for it are assumed to be self-evident. In this volume, Adam Posen explains in depth why a shift in Japanese fiscal and monetary policies, as well as financial reform, would be in Japan's self-interest. He demonstrates that Japanese economic stagnation in the 1990s is the result of mistaken fiscal austerity and financial laissez-faire rather than a structural decline of the "Japan Model." The author outlines a program for putting the country back on the path to solid economic growth - primarily through permanent tax cuts and monetary stabilization - and draws broader lessons from the recent Japanese policy actions that led to the country's continuing stagnation.

This book examines the causes of the Japanese deflationary economy, characterized as a structural deflation, and discusses how to alleviate the prolonged slowdown in order to restore Japan to a trajectory of high economic growth, with a special focus on the function of income distribution.

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 book gives a comprehensive description of macroeconometric modeling and its development over time. The first part depicts the history of macroeconometric model building, starting with Jan Tinbergen's and Lawrence R. Klein's contributions. It is unique in summarizing the development and specific structure of macroeconometric models built in North America, Europe, and various other parts of the world. The work thus offers an extensive source for researchers in the field. The second part of the book covers the systematic characteristics of macroeconometric models. It includes the household and enterprise sectors, disequilibria, financial flows, and money market sectors.

In the last fifteen years, Japan's economy has gone from model of success to object lesson in failure. William W. Grimes offers a richly detailed, insider's view of the key macroeconomic policies and events in contemporary Japan, as well as a close examination of the causes and effects of these upheavals. It is difficult to believe that the "Bubble Economy" of the late 1980s and the failed attempts at economic stimulation in the following decade both arose from the same policies. In Unmaking the Japanese Miracle, Grimes shows that this is precisely what happened. Focusing less on what went wrong than on why it went wrong, Grimes finds that mistaken macroeconomic policies—loose money in the late 1980s, excessively tight money until 1992, and only grudging use of expansionary fiscal policy until 1998—largely caused Japan's economic problems. Based on scores of interviews with Japanese policymakers, his is the first political explanation of why these catastrophic policies were carried out by the Ministry of Finance, the Bank of Japan, and the Diet. Various economic shocks were met, Grimes says, with a consistent and often inappropriate pattern of responses. This pattern has fundamentally altered because of changes within the three policymaking institutions since 1998.

This book reconsiders Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and establishes a new interpretation. In contrast to the existing models, this book finds that the stickiness in the nominal wage is not crucial for his theory. Moreover, the author has also succeeds in capturing the concept of liquidity in a rigorous mathematical model. In conjunction with the development of the concept of liquidity, the separation of the decision between savings and capital investment, which plays a key role in the principle of effective demand and denies Say’s law, is exactly and originally formulated. The theory thus developed is applicable to elucidating some serious political economic causes that entrap the long-stagnated Japanese economy. For example, an analytical explanation is provided about why disinflation/deflation incessantly progresses despite the exorbitant expansionary monetary policy (ijigen kin-yuu seisaku) by the Bank of Japan. This phenomenon is an unsolvable question from the quantity-theoretic approaches (e.g., monetarism and new Keynesianism) which, although they differ in assumptions concerning the length of adjustment periods, commonly assume that the price level sooner or later rises in proportion to the quantity of money. Owing much to Keynes, the author’s approach considers that the price level is mainly governed by its marginal prime cost which is equal to the nominal wage as a first approximation. As such, the drastically sagging wages during the past 10 years provoke serious disinflation/deflation. It should be noted that this discussion never depends on the quantity of money.