The Making of Asia’s First Bilateral FTA : Origins and Regional Implications of the Japan–Singapore Economic Partnership Agreement

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi ushered in a new era in Japans international trade policy in January 2002 when he and his Singaporean counterpart, Goh Chok Tong, signed the Japan-Singapore Economic Partnership Agreement (JSEPA), the first bilateral Free Trade Agreement (FTA) signed between Asian countries. This trade strategy also reflected Japans interest in launching its so-called multi-layered trade policy which meant the pursuit of bilateral and regional trading arrangements, including FTAs, in an attempt to complement multilateralism based on the GATT/WTO to reinvigorate efforts to achieve global trade liberalisation. This paper aims to examine how and why Japan and Singapore decided to pursue FTAs, what interests both perceived in their pursuit of FTAs, what elements contributed to both countries being linked in this trade policy arrangement, and what implications the JSEPA has had for the FTA movement in East Asia. It argues that the JSEPA was made possible mainly through Singapores initial offer to exclude agricultural products from tariff elimination. But Japan faced problems in seeking FTAs with other ASEAN countries which were less developed than Singapore and had a higher proportion of agricultural exports, as the exclusion of specific agricultural products, such as rice and sugar, would contradict Japans claim that its FTAs would bolster the WTO-based multilateral system. The proliferation of FTAs in East Asia may generate a spaghetti-bowl effect with varying rules of origin that may divert and distort trade, but the new age aspects of the Japan-Singapore agreement will also have some positive economic effects. Although the preferential trade elements of the agreement are detrimental, the smaller portion of tariff elimination results in a smaller trade diversion effect on trading partners. Therefore, the Japan-Singapore agreement carries symbolic meaning in terms of trade policy debates as well as signifying a paradigm shift in Japans international trade policy.FTA, Japan, Singapore

The Japan - Australia Partnership in the Era of the East Asian Community - Can they Advance Together?

This paper aims to examine the implications of the rise of East Asian regionalism for the Australia-Japan partnership. In particular, it investigates whether both nations can sustain their partnership, which evolved around Asia Pacific regionalism over the last few decades, by exploring the upsurge of Japans interest in East Asian regionalism and examining characteristics of Australias foreign policy under the Howard government, which lacked a regionalist approach in its first three terms but has shown a keener interest in furthering relations with East Asian countries and promoting East Asian regionalism since late 2004.East Asia, Japan, Australia, foreign policy, Howard government, Regionalism

Selective inference after feature selection via multiscale bootstrap

It is common to show the confidence intervals or $p$-values of selected features, or predictor variables in regression, but they often involve selection bias. The selective inference approach solves this bias by conditioning on the selection event. Most existing studies of selective inference consider a specific algorithm, such as Lasso, for feature selection, and thus they have difficulties in handling more complicated algorithms. Moreover, existing studies often consider unnecessarily restrictive events, leading to over-conditioning and lower statistical power. Our novel and widely-applicable resampling method addresses these issues to compute an approximately unbiased selective $p$-value for the selected features. We prove that the $p$-value computed by our resampling method is more accurate and more powerful than existing methods, while the computational cost is the same order as the classical bootstrap method. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our algorithm works well even for more complicated feature selection methods such as non-convex regularization.Comment: The title has changed (The previous title is "Selective inference after variable selection via multiscale bootstrap"). 23 pages, 11 figure

Explaining the Real Exchange Rate during Sudden Stops and Tranquil Periods

This paper untangles the causes behind real exchange rate devaluation events with particular attention paid to the Sudden Stop of capital flows. By utilizing cumulative impulse response function and variance decomposition analysis, we argue that there is the asymmetric response across Sudden Stop and tranquil times. Further comparison across the Sudden Stop in the 80s (gdebt crisish) and 90s (gSudden Stop crisish), however, reveals that the Sudden Stop disturbance has become more prominent in explaining the real exchange rate disturbance in Sudden Stop crisis of the 1990s rather than debt crisis of the 1980s.Exchange rate depreciation, Capital flows, Sudden Stop, Asia, and Latin America

Education and wage differentials in the Philippines

In the Philippines, an important part of income inequality is associated with the wage difference between the less educated and the better educated. The majority of the least educated are employed in low-paid services jobs and the agricultural sector. Tertiary education is to a large extent a prerequisite for high-paid occupations. Using the Labor Force Survey 2003-2007, this paper examines disparities in human capital endowment, returns to education, and the role of education in wage differentials in the Philippines. The empirical results show that returns to education monotonically increase - workers with elementary education, secondary education, and tertiary education earn 10 percent, 40 percent, and 100 percent more than those with no education. The results also show that education is the single most important factor that contributes to wage differentials. At the national level, education accounts for about 30 percent of the difference in wages. It accounts for a higher percentage of the difference for female workers (37 percent) than male workers (24 percent). There are also differences across regions and sectors. As an economy develops, the demand for skills increases. In the Philippines, efforts to improve education to increase the supply of highly educated people are important not only for long-term growth, but also for helping to translate growth into more equal opportunities for the children of the current generation.Labor Markets,Education For All,Tertiary Education,Labor Policies,Regional Economic Development

Toward Higgs inflation in the MSSM

Adopting a recently proposed single-superfield framework of supergravity inflation, we consider large field inflationary models in which MSSM Higgs-like fields play the role of the inflaton. In the simplest cases, the inflaton potential has a fractional power, which is different from that of the original Higgs inflation, and it can be tested by cosmological observations in near future. We find difficulties in identifying the inflaton with the MSSM Higgses and discuss possible candidates of the inflaton.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure; a contribution to the proceedings of The 2nd Toyama International Workshop on "Higgs as a Probe of New Physics 2015" (HPNP2015), based on a poster presentation given ther