This paper examines how inward and outward foreign direct investment (FDI) have influenced the restructuring of the Japanese economy and can be expected to continue to do so in the future. We find that outward investment has helped Japanese firms to sustain foreign market shares and contributed...

This paper analyzes two-way interactions between structural reform and macro policy. If structural reforms increase the flexibility of labor markets, they are likely to improve the short-run inflation-unemployment tradeoff, providing an incentive for policymakers to expand aggregate demand....

This paper provides definitions and measures of the extent of adaptability of an economy to exogenous changes in product prices, factor availability and technological change. It is argued that flexibility can in general only be defined relative to the exogenous changes that occur. Using a dual...

Policy discussions in Japan have increasingly recognized the important role of land values and land-use patterns in Japanese macroeconomic adjustment. In Japan in recent years, land wealth constitutes more than half of financial wealth, a proportion that is much higher than in the United States...

The resource boom effect and the input price effect of raw material price changes are analyzed within a two-period, two-sector (plus resource industry), open economy framework. Diagrammatic exposition is used to study the 'Dutch disease', and in particular the distinction between the short term...

We use a forty-two country model of production and trade to assess the implications of eliminating current account imbalances for relative wages, relative GDP's, real wages, and real absorption. How much relative GDP's need to change depends on flexibility of two forms: factor mobility and the...

Gross stocks of foreign assets have increased rapidly relative to national outputs since 1990, and the short-run capital gains and losses on those assets can amount to significant fractions of GDP. These fluctuations in asset values render the national income and product account measure of the...

The period preceding the global financial crisis was characterized by a substantial widening of current account imbalances across the world. Since the onset of the crisis, these imbalances have contracted to a significant extent. In this paper, we analyze the ongoing process of external...

Developing countries made considerable gains during the first decade of the 21st century. Their economies grew at unprecedented rates, resulting in large reductions in extreme poverty and a significant expansion of the middle class. But more recently that progress has slowed with an economic...