What caused Asia's largest economy, once the envy of the world, to lag behind many of the other industrial countries? And why did it take so long for Japan to recover from the bursting of its asset price bubble of the late 1980s? In this volume, a team from the International Monetary Fund...

This paper analyzes the welfare benefits from falling relative prices of IT (information technology) goods across a wide range of countries. We find, using two separate methodologies and datasets, that welfare benefits mainly accrue to users of IT, not their producers, because of falling...

This paper uses vector autoregressions (VARs) to investigate four explanations of the extended slump in Japanese economic activity during the 1990s: the absence of bold and consistent fiscal stimulus; limited room for expansionary monetary policy because of a liquidity trap; asset price...

Fast-growing countries tend to experience rapid export growth with little secular change in their terms of trade. This contradicts the standard Armington trade model, which predicts that fast-growing countries can experience rapid export growth only to the extent that they accept declining terms...