This paper examines the financial health of the Fiscal Investment and Loan Program (FILP) as of the end of March 2001. We study the financial conditions of FILP recipients, which include public corporations and local governments. We find many are de facto insolvent. Our estimates suggest as much...

Economic indicators are essential for policymaking and strategic decisions in both the public and private sectors. However, due to delays in the release of government indicators based on macroeconomic factors, there is a high demand for timely estimates or “nowcasting”. Many attempts have...

Economic indicators play a crucial role in shaping policy and strategy decisions in both the public and private sectors. However, as government indicators based on macroeconomic data are typically released one to two months later, there is a high demand for timely estimates of these values,...

This chapter investigates the effects of introducing the “generational election system” proposed by Ihori and Doi (1998). The generational election system (or the election district by generation) consists of election districts divided by not only region but also generation. In industrial...

This paper investigates how the soft budget constraint with grants from the central government to local governments tends to exaggerate inefficient local expenditures. We first develop a theoretical model, which explains soft budget problem in a multi-government setting. We then show that in...

This paper investigates poverty traps with the Local Allocation Tax (LAT) grants in Japan. The LAT grants, which distributed to local governments by the central government, may be hesitated to make efforts for enhancing regional economic growth, due to the calculation of the LAT grants. We show...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze sustainability issues of Japan's fiscal policy and then to discuss the debt management policy using theoretical models and numerical studies. We also investigate the desirable coordination of fiscal and monetary authorities toward fiscal reconstruction. We...