Current Japanese General Energy Statistics quantifies energy and carbon balance of oil refinery sector solely by input such as crude oil and output such as gasoline, and regards the discrepancy as a statistical error and does not count energy consumption or energy origin carbon dioxide emission...

The "General Energy Statistics of Japan" is typical assembled statistics issued by the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy under the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and used as a basic statistics for Energy and Environment policy making area. The current version of the statistics is...

Economic activities in the service sector have been increasingly important in developed countries. Despite the importance of the service sector, there are several drawbacks with a conventional way of measuring service sector productivity. This paper proposes an alternative methodology in which...

Japan is the leading supplier of sophisticated capital goods to East Asian countries. These goods embody advanced technologies and facilitate learning and productivity growth. Capital goods also represent 30%-40% of Japan's exports. This paper investigates the determinants of these exports....

In this paper, we investigate why information and communication technology (ICT) investment in Japan has stagnated since the 1990s. Given that a notable characteristic of Japan's economy is that small as well as older firms play a much greater role than in other economies, particularly that of...

This paper aims to explain why housing investment in Japan stagnated in the 2000s. Housing investment consists of two parts: replacement and a net increase of housing stock, which can be further decomposed into changes in the number of households and the housing utilization rate. Using the...

China runs surpluses of $400 billion-$500 billion in processing trade. In value-added terms, East Asia as a whole runs surpluses in processing trade with the West. This generates appreciation pressures on exchange rates throughout the region. Using data up to 2012, this paper reports that a...

This paper investigates the influence of international investment agreements (IIAs) on the actions of multinational enterprises (MNEs) and the social welfare of host countries according to the market structure in the host country. In cases where MNEs are monopolies and duopolies, IIAs promote...

The Information Technology Agreement (ITA), enacted in 1997 as one of a few World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements realized after the Uruguay Round, lifted tariffs on a broad range of IT products such as telecommunication equipment and computers. As part of the General Agreement on Tariffs...

This paper presents an alternative approach to measuring the values of transport time for freight transportation, and examines its applicability through empirical analysis. We develop a model of the freight transportation market, in which carriers incur the cost associated with the effort to...