Japan's official development assistance : recent issues and future directions

Japan remains the world's largest national donor of aid funds. But the Japanese government, facing prolonged economic stagnation and mounting public sector debt, is under increasing public pressure to reduce aid budgets and to use official development assistance in more explicit pursuit of Japan's own economic and political interests. Internationally, Japan continues to attract criticism for its emphasis on infrastructure projects and its limited willingness to participate in multilateral partnerships. The authors argue that Japan can meet these domestic and international challenges by developing a coherent national strategy for official development assistance, broadly designed to enhance effectiveness, accountability, and transparency.Decentralization,Banks&Banking Reform,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Gender and Development,Economic Adjustment and Lending,Banks&Banking Reform,Development Economics&Aid Effectiveness,Economic Theory&Research,Economic Adjustment and Lending,Public Sector Economics&Finance

Proposed strategy for a regional exchange rate arrangement in post-crisis East Asia

After discussing major conceptual, and empirical issues relevant to the exchange rate policies of East Asian countries, the authors propose a regional exchange rate arrangement designed to promote intra-regional exchange rate stability, and regional economic growth. They argue that: 1) For developing countries, exchange rate volatility tends to significantly hurt trade and investment, making it inadvisable to adopt a system of freely floating exchange rates. 2) Given the high share of intra-regional trade, and the similarity of trade composition in East Asia, exchange rate policy should be directed toward maintaining intra-regional exchange rate stability, to promote trade, investment, and economic growth. 3) the current policy of maintaining exchange rate stability against U.S. dollar as an informal, uncoordinated mechanisms for ensuring intra-regional exchange rate stability is sub-optimal. A pragmatic policy option - conducive to a more robust framework for cooperation in monetary, and exchange rate policy - wold be a coordinated action to shift the target of nominal exchange rate stability, to a basket of tri-polar currencies (the U.S. dollar, the Japanese yen, and the Euro). This alternative would better reflect the region's diverse structure of trade, and foreign direct investment.The authors envision no rigid peg. Instead, at least initially, each country could choose its own formal exchange rate arrangement - be it currency board, a crawling peg, or a basket peg with wide margins. At times of crisis, the peg might be temporarily suspended, subject to the rule that the exchange rate would be restored to the original level as soon as practical. Only in extreme circumstances, would the level be adjusted to reflect new equilibrium conditions.Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Stabilization,Macroeconomic Management,Fiscal&Monetary Policy,Economic Theory&Research

Why was Japan hit so hard by the global financial crisis?

Japan was hit hard by the global financial crisis even though its relatively resilient financial system initially limited the direct impact. The severe collapse of industrial production that followed was no doubt attributable to a confluence of factors, but the paper highlights the impact that came from the contractionary effect of global deleveraging on the real economy. In this environment, Japan was particularly vulnerable because of the structural changes that had taken place over the past decade in its trade and industrial structures. Vector autoregression analysis confirms that, as a result of these structural changes, Japanese output became much more responsive to output shocks in the advanced markets of the United States and Western Europe. The structural changes had two components. First, over 90% of Japan's exports consisted of highly income-elastic industrial supplies, capital goods, and consumer durables. Though emerging Asia is Japan's largest export market, its imports from Japan largely consist of intermediate goods used in the production of final goods destined for the US and Western Europe. Second, Japan's trade dependence had increased since the early 2000s, as evidenced by a rising export to gross domestic product ratio and a declining share for the non-tradable sector. Though increasing trade openness is a natural part of economic globalization and regional integration, the manner in which this process had played out made Japan particularly vulnerable to a negative demand shock coming from outside. To make Japan more resilient to external shocks, policymakers could promote the export of finished goods to emerging Asia by establishing a region-wide free trade arrangement. To promote domestic demand, the social protection system needs to be strengthened so as to reduce households' uncertainty for the future; a more liberal immigration policy should help invigorate private investment in an aging society. To facilitate a better allocation of resources, further deregulatory measures in the more regulated non-tradable goods sector are called for; a substantial lifting of restrictions in agriculture, especially regarding the corporatization of production, would be especially helpful. With little available fiscal space, these measures will help create a climate in which private investment can flourish, driven by final domestic demand

A survey of the literature on managing capital inflows

How to manage capital inflows remains an important policy issue for many emerging market economies. This paper presents a brief survey of the literature on managing capital inflows, with a focus on developing and emerging market economies. The paper, after discussing the economic characteristics of capital inflows, provides an overview of the evolution of thinking on capital account liberalization, the use of capital controls as an instrument of managing capital inflows, and the effectiveness and limitations of conventional macroeconomic and structural instruments. Although the literature is still evolving, it provides little practical guidance on capital account liberalization. For those countries facing a surge in capital inflows, consensus seems to be that, aside from learning to live with an appreciating (and fluctuating) currency, and strengthening the financial system, there is no effective and sustainable policy measure either to reduce the size of inflows or to prevent the adverse consequence of such inflows. Additional work is especially needed to develop tools to identify and quantify the various risks of capital inflows

Large N reduction on coset spaces

As an extension of our previous work concerning the large N reduction on group manifolds, we study the large N reduction on coset spaces. We show that large N field theories on coset spaces are described by certain corresponding matrix models. We also construct Chern-Simons-like theories on group manifolds and coset spaces, and give their reduced models.Comment: 22 pages, typos correcte

Large N reduction on group manifolds

We show that the large N reduction holds on group manifolds. Large N field theories defined on group manifolds are equivalent to some corresponding matrix models. For instance, gauge theories on S^3 can be regularized in a gauge invariant and SO(4) invariant manner.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figures, typos corrected, a reference adde