This paper presents data on Japan's household saving rate, onsiders the reasons for Japan's high household saving rate in the past and the reasons for the recent decline therein, projects future trends in Japan's household saving rate, and consider the implications of my findings. It finds that...

In this paper, we conduct a dynamic panel analysis of the determinants of the household saving rate in China using a life cycle model and panel data on Chinese provinces for the 1995-2004 period from China's household survey. We find that China's household saving rate has been high and rising...

In this paper, I survey the previous literature on the saving behavior of the aged in Japan and then present some survey data on the saving behavior of the aged in Japan that became available recently. To summarize the main findings of this paper, all previous studies as well as the newly...

In this paper, I analyze the causes of the prolonged slowdown of the Japanese economy in the 1990s and find that the stagnation of investment, especially private fixed investment, was the primary culprit. I then investigate the causes of the stagnation of household consumption during the 1990s...

In this paper, I consider the extent to which the stagnation of household consumption is responsible for the decade-long recession in Japan during the 1990s and early 2000s and the reasons for the stagnation of household consumption during this period. I find that the stagnation of private...

This paper analyzes the impact of the age structure of the population on Japan's household saving rate by applying cointegration techniques to time-series data for the 1955-1993 period. It finds that the ratio of minors to the working-age population and that of the aged to the working-age...

In recent years, a number of central banks have chosen to orient their monetary policy toward the achievement of numerical inflation targets. This study examines the experience of the first three countries to adopt an inflation-targeting strategy--New Zealand, Canada, and the United Kingdom. It...

Many observers have held up the records of price stability in Germany and in Switzerland as examples of the benefits of a monetary targeting regime. These claims have been juxtaposed in recent years with econometric analyses of Bundesbank policy which have shown an absence of dependable...

After the recent IT bubble, Germany alone among OECD countries is beginning to share Japan's political-economic profile: too many banks with too little capital, macroeconomic policy division and deflationary bias, and financially and politically passive households. Germany has been spared...

As the United States emerges from the Great Recession, concern is rising over the issues of income inequality, stagnation of wages, and especially the struggles of lower-skilled workers at the bottom end of the wage scale. A number of major American employers—for example, Aetna and...