SUGGESTIONS ON THE EVALUATION OF INTERNATIONAL TRADE STATISTICS FOR MARKET RESEARCH

International Relations/Trade, Marketing,

Building Innovative Communities: Lessons from Japan's Science City Projects

Japan's Science City projects are examined in this paper to find the extent that they promote catalytic mechanisms within their communities. It is arguable that the concept of a Science City is little more than a theme for funneling public funds into infrastructural development in support of select high-technology industries. Is this the situation in Japan? Attention focuses on cumulative causation, resource sharing and the shifting mix of private sector initiative and public policy in the evolving cases of Tsukuba and Kansai Science Cities. Regional technopolis projects are also discussed. Can we expect any of these areas to fulfill the promise, detailed in the Kansai Science City Second Stage Plan Report, of being a "pilot model city" deploying "innovative and experimental community development"?technopolis; regional planning; development; cumulative causation; catalytic mechanisms

Northeast Asian Dynamism: Ten Top Impediments & Countermeasures

Northeast Asia has had trouble developing regional interaction, cooperation and market synergies; this paper summarizes key impediments and proposes various countermeasures. Suggestions include improvements in administrative transparency and property law, building on EU and ASEAN organizing experiences through benchmarking, and offering free or low-cost land to boost migration & investment. A bilingual annotated appendix lists over fifty multilateral coordinating initiatives & key organizations involved with Northeast Asia regional development.regionalism; cooperation; tradition; infrastructural development; rapprochement; bridging historical frictions; land rush; opportunity costs & competitiveness

Wrestling with Japanese Tribalism Emerging Collaborative Opportunities For India and Japan

Japanese firms, with their strong technology base and high domestic factor costs, have the potential of teaming with India, with its more basic infrastructure and eight times the population. Japan's poorly-performing excess capital could fuel India's strongly-developing middle class and robust entrepreneurialism. Especially promising are collaborative information technology projects. What stands in the way of a greatly expanded relationship? Much of the blockage stems from Japan's insularism, an impetus here labeled tribalism. A hopeful dimension is that this tribalism can be clearly defined as archaic, recognized as detrimental, and then toned-down. Further points for development include an active campaign to encourage diversity in Japan, teaming up to provide alternatives to investment in neighboring China, and agitating for representation on the UN Security Council. India can help initiate all these processes, and can in turn benefit from a Japan reaching out for regional economic partnerships.homogeneity; tribalism; UN Security Council; partnership; immigration; trade; e-Japan strategy

The demand for meat in Japan: disaggregation and its effect upon estimated demand

This study examines the effects of different model specifications upon estimates of Japanese meat demand. Two static Almost Ideal Demand Systems (AIDS) are estimated using two different levels of disaggregation in Japanese meat consumption. The demand relationships among various meat groups are estimated and compared between a model based on origin and a model based on quality differences

A quantum and semiclassical study of dynamical resonances in the C + NO-->CN + O reaction

Accurate quantum mechanical reactive scattering calculations were performed for the collinear C+NO-->CN+O reaction using a polynomial-modified London Eyring Polanyi Sato (PQLEPS) potential energy surface (PES), which has a 4.26 eV deep well in the strong interaction region, and a reference LEPS PES, which has no well in that region. The reaction probabilities obtained for both PESs show signatures for resonances. These resonances were characterized by calculating the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the collision lifetime matrix as a function of energy. Many resonances were found for scattering on both PESs, indicating that the potential well in the PQLEPS PES does not play the sole role in producing resonances in this relatively heavy atom system and that Feshbach processes occur for both PESs. However, the well in the PQLEPS PES is responsible for the differences in the energies, lifetimes, and compositions of the corresponding resonance states. These resonances are also interpreted in terms of simple periodic orbits supported by both PESs (using the WKB formalism), to further illustrate the role played by that potential well on the dynamics of this reaction. The existence of the resonances is associated with the dynamics of the long-lived CNO complex, which is much different than that of systems having an activation barrier. Although these results were obtained for a collinear model of the reaction, its collinearly-dominated nature suggests that related resonant behavior may occur in the real world