Extreme rainfall events and the clustering of extreme values provide fundamental information which can be used for the risk assessment of extreme floods. Event probability can be estimated using the extreme value index (γ) which describes the behavior of the upper tail and measures the degree...

This paper focuses on the US Billion-dollar Weather/Climate Disaster report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center. The current methodology for the production of this loss dataset is described, highlighting its strengths and limitations including...

pProfessor Kazuo Sato has prepared a detailed critique of my paper, "From Growth Superstar to Economic Underachiever." His main points are:/pp1. Japan, far from being an underperformer in 1973-90, was still superior since its per capita GDP growth was higher than the growh of other leading...

Japan is a case of "success that soured."sup1/sup While Japan was a miracle economy during the high-growth era, the miracle ran out of juice more than twenty years ago. A twenty-three-country regression using a "conditional convergence" model shows that, in 1960-70, Japan achieved 8.4 percent...

A number of remarkable changes have occurred since the 1998 publication of >i>Japan: The System That Soured: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Economic Miracle.>/i> Those changes are tracked in the updates presented in this special double issue of >i>The Japanese Economy>/i> (vol. 29, nos. 5â6).