Is Japan's saving rate high?

There are two major differences between Japan and the United States in the way saving is calculated in their national accounts. First, depreciation in Japanese national accounts is based on historical costs, which leads to an understatement of true depreciation and hence an overstatement of net saving. Second, government capital formation is not included in U.S. saving. This article adjusts the official Japanese saving numbers by evaluating depreciation at replacement costs and excluding government capital formation from saving. Doing so significantly reduces the apparent gap between the national saving rates of the two countries. Since 1970 Japan's national saving rate has been declining to the stationary U.S. rate. This trend, however, has been reversed in recent years. In contrast, Japan's wealth-to-income ratio (excluding land), after declining in the late 1950s, has been rising toward the U.S. ratio and has reached the U.S. level in 1987.Saving and investment ; Japan

Taxes and Corporate Investment in Japanese Manufacturing

This paper examines the impact of taxes on the incentive to invest for the Japanese manufacturing sector in the postwar period. The idyosyricratic feature of the Japanese corporation tax system as compared to the U.S. is the prevelence of tax-free reserves and the tax deductibility of a part of taxes paid by corporations in the previous year. Our formula for the tax-adjusted Q and the cost of capital incorporates this. The main conclusions areas follows. While the postulated negative relation with the cost of capital cannot be found, investment in Japanese manufacturing shows until 1974 a strong association with the tax-adjusted Q. Since the change in stock prices, not taxes, is the primary source of changes in Q, the profitability of capitalis the major determinant of investment.

Can IT be Japan's Savior?

This paper constructs a multi-sector model to take explicit account of the very sharp change in the relative price between non-IT and IT goods. The model is calibrated to the Japanese economy, and its solution path from 1990 on is compared to Japan's macroeconomic performance in the 1990s. Compared to the one-sector analysis of Japan in the 1990s in Hayashi and Prescott (2002), our model does slightly better or just as well in accounting for Japan's output slump and does worse in accounting for the capital-output ratio. We also show that, to revive a 2% long-term growth in percapita GDP, Japan needs to direct 10% of private total hours to the IT sector.

Research and Development As An Investment

About 20 percent of the gross investment expenditures of U.S. manufacturing firms is expenditures on research and development. Like investment in physical capital, R&D also responds to news about future prospects of the firm, such as profitability, technological opportunities, or changes in factor prices. Using data from a panel of large U.S. manufacturing firms that was developed within the Productivity Program of the NBER, we investigate the differential responses of these two types of investment to changes in the value of the firm's assets as perceived by financial markets and the interaction of these responses. In order to study this topic empirically, we develop a stochastic dynamic programming model of a firm with two types of capital (physical and knowledge capital) which are used to produce profits. A feature of the model is the distinction between the accumulation of the two kinds of capital: expenditures on the physical capital stock are incurred one or more years before the capital actually becomes productive, whereas R&D capital is produced jointly as a function of current expenditure and the past technological position of the firm. Two individual firm specific shocks are considered: one to the overall profitability of the firm, and one to the "productivity" of R&D. In the empirical estimates, we find that these two shocks account for about 20 percent of the total variance in net investment, 15 percent of the variance in the firm-level R&D to capital ratio, but only about 5 percent of the annual rates of return. The profitability shock is well described by a moving average process of order three, while the technology shock process is more nearly permanent: first order autoregressive with parameter near unity.

Is the Japanese extended family altruistically linked? A test based on Engel curves

Altruism has the well-known neutrality implication that consumption is invariant to division of resources within the family. We test this by estimating Engel curves for Japanese two-generation households. The hypothesis that Engel curves are not affected by division of resources between parent and child can be strongly rejected. The food items whose budget share increases with parent's share of household income are precisely those favored by old generations such as cereal, fish, and vegetables

The main bank system and corporate investment: An empirical reassessment

This paper examines whether the sensitivity of corporate investment to internal funds depends on the firm's access to a main bank, using the sample of Japanese manufacturing firms constructed by Hayashi and Inoue (1991). For either of two classifications of firms by their access to a main bank, there is no evidence that main bank ties mitigate the sensitivity of investment to the firm's liquidity. The large effect of main bank ties reported in Hoshi, Kashyap, and Scharfstein (1991) is most likely due to the relatively poor quality of their capital stock estimate

Japan's saving rate: An update

In this paper I report my most recent calculation of Japan's saving rate. It has been almost ten years since I realized that Japan's saving rate as compiled in the Japanese National Income Accounts was substantially overstated (see Hayashi (1986)). Since then I have had several occasions to update my calculation of adjusted Japanese saving rate. The last update is in Hayashi (1991). The calculation I report in this paper will incorporate not only the National Income Accounts data that became available since the last update but also recent criticisms made by Iwamoto (1994)

The Depressing Effect of Agricultural Institutions on the Prewar Japanese Economy

The question we address in this paper is why the Japanese miracle didn't take place until after World War II. For much of the pre-WWII period, Japan's real GNP per worker was not much more than a third of that of the U.S., with falling capital intensity. We argue that its major cause is a barrier that kept agricultural employment constant at about 14 million throughout the prewar period. In our two-sector neoclassical growth model, the barrier-induced sectoral mis-allocation of labor and a resulting disincentive for capital accumulation account well for the depressed output level. Were it not for the barrier, Japan's prewar GNP per worker would have been close to a half of the U.S. The labor barrier existed because, we argue, the prewar patriarchy, armed with paternalistic clauses in the prewar Civil Code, forced the son designated as heir to stay in agriculture.

Eulichas incisicolils (coleoptera: Eulichadidae), an important decomposer of leaf litter in Asian tropical stream communities

Article信州大学理学部附属諏訪臨湖実験所報告 9: 25-28(1995)departmental bulletin pape