This research study uses logistics data to forecast economic trends, focusing on the correlation between air and maritime transportation volumes and economic growth. It covers the top three Gross Domestic Product (GDP) countries (USA, China, and Japan) and India as a representative emerging economy. It analyzes annual data from 1974 to 2021 for GDP and air transport volume and from 2000 to 2021 for maritime transport volume. The findings reveal a causal relationship between air transport and GDP in the mentioned countries, with significant practical implications for business and policy planning, providing the reader with actionable insights and a deeper understanding of economic trends.

Previous studies have suggested the importance of early detection of child developmental disorders and support forchildren and their parents. Child developmental and parental support are provided at both public and private facilities. Still,obtaining a physician's diagnosis at a medical institution is essential to determine whether a person has a developmental disorder.However, diagnosing a developmental disorder at the first visit to a medical institution with a child development outpatient clinicis time-consuming. Furthermore, developmental disorders are often associated with multiple comorbidities. Parents must identifychildren's problem behaviors before taking them to an outpatient clinic and understand how they consider such behaviors forappropriate diagnosis. Therefore, in this study, a private developmental support service company surveyed parents who had visiteda child development outpatient clinic at a medical institution. Chi-square test analysis revealed that the number of parents of boyshaving ≥2 problem behaviors was significantly higher than that of parents of girls (P< 0.01). In addition, parents who waited fortheir first medical visit for >0.5 years used multiple resources rather than a single resource to gain knowledge on their child'sproblem behaviors (P< 0.01). Therefore, parents of boys who visited the developmental outpatient clinic for the first time werealready aware of their children’s multiple problem behaviors before the examination; when the waiting period was prolonged, theparents used multiple resources to collect information before visiting a medical institution.

This paper demonstrates that expenditure/income discrepancies appearing in national accounts are caused partly by the nominal distortion due to the presence of two price units, and partly by the real distortion due to the mismeasurement of expenditure items. In addition, it investigates how such statistical discrepancies reveal potentially important information about various informal, though not necessarily illegal, economic activities, which are not grasped fully by statistical or tax authorities in a central government. Three cases are explored in detail. First, after-consumption-tax prices are mixed with before-consumption-tax prices in aggregating expenditures. Second, black-market prices coexist with official prices in a heavily controlled economy. Third, prices are quoted in not only a conventional currency unit, but also a more valuable cryptocurrency unit; however, the latter unit is still evaluated one to one with the former. Unlike in macroeconomic disequilibrium models, statistical discrepancies are not ex ante concepts, but they actually occur ex post. This paper examines how ex post excess demand/supply within the formal economy, resulting from such discrepancies, is adjusted by monetary and nonmonetary interactions with the informal or underground economy.

In the past quarter century, Japan’s economy has seen rates of interest, including those on long-term public bonds, remain quite low despite colossal accumulation of public debt, while the price level has been mildly deflationary or almost constant despite rapid monetary expansion. In this chapter, these puzzling phenomena are interpreted using a simple disequilibrium analysis framework. The major reasons for adopting disequilibrium analysis are that (1) Japan’s economy often fell into excess supply in both goods and labor markets after short-term rates of interest were controlled below 0.5% in mid-1995, and (2) public bond markets were clearly in serious excess supply given the expectation that the primary fiscal balance was not going to turn into surpluses in the future relevant to those bonds being issued. In the proposed disequilibrium model, excess supply in goods, labor, and public bond markets is absorbed by excess demand in money markets, induced by strong money demand at near-zero interest rates. In particular, strong money demand absorbs public bonds not as investment instruments, but as money substitutes. This chapter also demonstrates that excess demand in money markets in disequilibrium analysis can be interpreted as public bond price bubbles in equilibrium analysis. Given the analogy between the two approaches, as far as the bubble is sustained, mild deflationMild deflation and near-zero interest ratesNear-zero interest rates continue in spite of massive issues of public bonds and rapid expansion of money stocks. On the other hand, once the bubble bursts, money demand shrinks drastically, a wide range of interest rates rise suddenly, and the price level jumps abruptly. With the government’s credible commitment to future fiscal reforms, a one-off price surge would stop immediately at a level two or three times higher than before, but without the reforms, the price process would be hyperinflationary.

This chapter discusses the possible macroeconomic consequences of the introduction of cryptocurrencies by central banks (so-called central bank cryptocurrenciesCentral bank cryptocurrency (CBCC) or CBCCs) in a competitive equilibrium environment. In this setup, central banks set not only the money supply, but also the interest rate on CBCCs, whereas bond interest rates, the price level, and the exchange rates between CBCCs are determined in competitive markets. We first resolve a severe confrontation between the quantity theory of money (QTM) and the fiscal theory of the price level (FTPL) in that, as long as the currency interest rate lies below the bond interest rate, the QTM is applicable in principle. However, once the bond interest rate (asymptotically) matches that of the currency, the QTM is replaced by the FTPL, or the monetary and fiscal theory of the price level (MFTPL), in which the government’s budget constraint as well as money market conditions jointly work to determine the price level as discussed in Chapters “ Public Bonds as Money Substitutes at Near-Zero Interest Rates: Disequilibrium Analysis of the Current and Future Japanese Economy and Long-Run Mild Deflation Under Fiscal Unsustaina-Bility in Contemporary Japan ”. We then investigate whether the introduction of CBCCs plays a role in the disappearance of strong money demand (currently present at near-zero interest rates in Japan) and its alternatives. We find that if a central bank sets the currency interest rate below a near-zero bond interest rate, then strong money demand disappears, and the massive issuance of long-term public bonds is no longer absorbed in currency markets. However, once the consolidated government succeeds in lowering the currency interest rate to be deeply negative, it can obtain immense seigniorage, allowing it to repay these public bonds. In addition, if the bond interest rate also falls, even below zero for long periods, then the government can exploit seigniorage from CBCC holders without limit.

Advances in Japanese Business and Economics (AJBE) showcases the work of Japanese and non-Japanese scholars researching the Japanese economy and Japanese businesses.Published in English, the series highlights for a global readership the unique perspectives of Japan's most distinguished and emerging scholars of business and economics.It covers research of either theoretical or empirical nature, in both authored and edited volumes, regardless of the sub-discipline or geographical coverage, including, but not limited to, such topics as macroeconomics, microeconomics, industrial relations, innovation, regional development, entrepreneurship, international trade, globalization, financial markets, technology management, and business strategy.At the same time, as a series of volumes written by Japanese and non-Japanese scholars studying Japan, it includes research on the issues of the Japanese economy, industry, management practice, and policy, such as the economic policies and business innovations before and after the Japanese "bubble" burst in the 1990s.AJBE endeavors to overcome a historical deficit in the dissemination of Japanese economic theory, research methodology, and analysis.The volumes in the series contribute not only to a deeper understanding of Japanese business and economics but to revealing underlying universal principles.

A macroeconomic policy debate has been ongoing in Japan for over the past two decades, with one side proposing drastic fiscal reforms to avoid hyperinflation and the other recommending expansionary policies to escape from a liquidity trap. However, neither side has been able to explain why mild deflation has continued for such a long time, despite primary budget deficits and unprecedented monetary expansion. This paper presents an alternative theory, arguing that fiscal sustainability will be restored in the future not as a result of drastic fiscal reforms, hyperinflation, or continuous mild inflation, but largely through a one-off surge in the price level, such that the price level becomes several times higher than before. Such a price surge is considered a rare event accompanied by catastrophic endowment shocks in the following years. Within this framework, mild deflation coexists with fiscal unsustainability until this sharp surge in the price level occurs.

Employing the Japanese case of large-scale black marketsBlack market under extensive price controls during and immediately after World War II, we first explore how much income leaked out of the formal economy into the black markets. Then, we investigate the extent to which the circulation of Bank of Japan (BOJ) notesBank of Japan (BOJ) note helped the leaked income to flow back into the formal economy when the notes were held as an instrument to conceal illicit income by the black marketeers. According to our estimates, 6–30% of national income leaked into the black markets in the above period, while more than 40% of the leaked income returned to the treasury as massive seigniorage revenues in the last years of the war. Inflation was not too high during the war because of the black marketeers’ strong money demand. After the war, however, the black marketeers shifted their portfolios from BOJ notes to physical assets and land, thereby reducing their money demand and accelerating inflation. We also demonstrate that the black markets helped to reserve scarce physical resources for the post-control economy starting in the late 1940s.

If the Japanese title of this book, written by political scientist Yosuke Sunahara, were translated literally, it would read How do you like new houses? Housing and politics in Japan. However, this verbatim translation may not convey to the general reader what is addressed in this book. Thus, the non-literal title How has a strong preference for ownership of newly-built houses been formed in Japan? is more informative. The question on the flip side of this is: Why have rental and secondary housing markets been poorly developed in Japan? The author does not point out any simple cause-and-effect relationship for the above preference formation. He instead analyses it as a consequence of a complicated complementary relationship among political and institutional factors. Each factor picked up by the author is not necessarily based on his original research. Nevertheless, a key feature of this book is that it offers a systematic and concise summary of the most important factors that have been studied intensively and extensively in existing literature.

This paper develops a simple and tractable model of net capital flows in which time-varying gross country portfolios are an essential element in current account imbalances. The main constituents of country portfolios in the model are general derivatives, which could be interpreted as nominal bond assets and liabilities in particular. Under very weak conditions, the world wealth distribution is stationary. Stationarity is generated by movements in derivative (i.e., bond) risk-premia such that the return on a debtor country's gross liabilities is less than the return on its gross assets. This is well known feature of the US international investment position. We also provide suggestive evidence that a similar property holds more widely for a sample of advanced and emerging market countries.

In this paper, we explore how asset pricing reflects public perceptions of earthquake risk using officially appraised prices of land situated along the Uemachi fault, lying along a north-south axis in the east of Osaka prefecture in Japan. We find that active fault risk has been included significantly in land pricing, only since residents and even policymakers first realized considerable earthquake risk involved in the land along the Uemachi fault by observing that in January 1995, the earthquake driven by the Rokko-Awaji fault had catastrophic damages on the southern part of Hyogo prefecture. We estimate that nonresidential land prices along the Uemachi fault are discounted by 4 percent for every 100 meters closer to the fault line.

This paper investigates the intergenerational sharing of shocks on the permanent income of new entry cohorts through capital market transactions. Even when Lucas trees only are traded among generations, procyclical cohort-specific shocks are shared to some extent by the movement of asset prices; cohorts with lower endowments might benefit much more than cohorts with higher endowments from asset pricing dynamics. However, such cohort shocks remain partially uninsured, particularly when the elasticity of intertemporal substitution is large and the frequency of investment opportunities is limited. Given a reasonable set of parameters concerning the Japanese labor market, a welfare loss would be 1–3% in terms of the certainty equivalence consumption level. The optimal policy argument suggests that a policy should reflect not the intertemporal transfer from cohorts with high endowments to cohorts with low endowments, but the intratemporal risk sharing between labor and capital income.

This note demonstrates analytically that a persistent catastrophic shock on endowment growth, even if moderate, yields negative equity premiums when a representative agent is relatively prudent. In particular, it derives the minimum persistence necessary to have zero equity premiums.

Nakashima, Kiyotaka, and Saito, Makoto-On the comparison of alternative specifications for money demand: The case of extremely low interest rate regimes in JapanUsing Japanese money market data, this paper compares the predictive ability of the log-log specification with infinite elasticity at a zero interest rate and the semilog specification with a one time switch from moderate to relatively high semielasticity at annual interest rates less than 0.5%. We find that the latter specification dominates the former in terms of predictive ability for the extremely low interest rate regime (the period between 1999 and 2006) because under the former the semielasticity is excessively sensitive to slight changes in interest rates. We find that interest rate semielasticity has remained stable at a high level since the mid-1990s. J. Japanese Int. Economies 26 (3) (2012) 454-471. Faculty of Economics, Konan University, Okamoto 8-9-1, Higashinada, Kobe 658-8501, Japan; Faculty of Economics, Hitotsubashi University, Naka 2-1, Kunitachi, Tokyo 186-8603, Japan. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In this research note, we analyze the mechanism behind Tokyo residents’ earthquake insurance purchase decision by means of average household income data and earthquake risk indices. The main results are (1) there is a positive relationship between the earthquake insurance participation rate and average household income, (2) cross-subsidization occurs between areas with different earthquake risk index values, and (3) the earthquake insurance participation rate is high in areas where earthquake risk index values are high, implying household earthquake awareness is relatively high.

This paper explores a dynamic two-country model with production externalities in which capital goods are not traded and international lending and borrowing are allowed. Unlike the integrated world economy model based on the Heckscher-Ohlin setting, our model yields indeterniinacy of equilibrium under a wider set of parameter values than in the corresponding closed economy model. Our finding demonstrates that the assumption on trade structure would be a relevant determinant in considering the relation between globalization and economic volatility.