Impacts of currency fluctuations on Japanese foreign direct investment

The Japanese currency has appreciated substantially against most other currencies over the last two decades. During the same time Japan has become one of the world\u27s largest providers of FDI. Japan\u27s share of total FDI outflows increased from about 6 percent during the late 70\u27s to 21 percent in 1990 while its share of the total stock of FDI in the world increased from less than 1 percent in 1960 to more than 13 percent in 1993. Not surprisingly, Japan\u27s role in international business in general and its FDI activities, in particular, have attracted considerable attention from researchers world wide. However, much of this attention has been directed towards the patterns and determinants of Japanese foreign direct investment, in particular to the United States. The impact of changes in the value of the Yen on Japanese FDI has been largely overlooked. Thus, this paper fills an important gap in the literature by focusing on the influence of changes of the exchange rate on Japanese foreign direct investment. A comprehensive simultaneous equa-tion model of Japanese FDI is developed on a regional level to gauge the extent to which currency fluctuations affect Japanese FDI activities. The results suggest that the exchange rate is an effective mechanism through which to influence FDI. Thus, the exchange rate should not be overlooked by the World Trade Organisation in its efforts to further liberalise investment through the Multilateral Agreement on Investment.<br /

Soil health in agricultural systems

Soil health is presented as an integrative property that reflects the capacity of soil to respond to agricultural intervention, so that it continues to support both the agricultural production and the provision of other ecosystem services. The major challenge within sustainable soil management is to conserve ecosystem service delivery while optimizing agricultural yields. It is proposed that soil health is dependent on the maintenance of four major functions: carbon transformations; nutrient cycles; soil structure maintenance; and the regulation of pests and diseases. Each of these functions is manifested as an aggregate of a variety of biological processes provided by a diversity of interacting soil organisms under the influence of the abiotic soil environment. Analysis of current models of the soil community under the impact of agricultural interventions (particularly those entailing substitution of biological processes with fossil fuel-derived energy or inputs) confirms the highly integrative pattern of interactions within each of these functions and leads to the conclusion that measurement of individual groups of organisms, processes or soil properties does not suffice to indicate the state of the soil health. A further conclusion is that quantifying the flow of energy and carbon between functions is an essential but non-trivial task for the assessment and management of soil health