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With the experience of two severe disasters (the Hanshin Awaji Earthquake disaster of 1995 and the Great East Japan Earthquake disaster of 2011), I wish to consider 'subsistence' as human life, existence equaling the basic activities of life, an essential mutual act-like existence economy. In this paper, I pursue a positive development of 'disaster-time economics' as a research object under the larger framework of the formation of a 'moral economy,' as part of a critical process. In this paper, in order that a stricken area and society may aim at the realization of a new methodology about 'creative revival' for newly developing independent research involving the state of the revival fund of a wide sense is carried out. Nevertheless, there is an overall understanding of who, in what areas, and using what methodology, has conducted research in the restoration and revival process, as well as the weak points that tend to hinder the process. There is no research on the rationality and function of public finance expenditures or national sources expenditures. Therefore, in this paper, the term 'disaster-time economy' is newly prepared. From this concept, many activities of the project, service, support, self-efforts etc. of a social and private domain are grasped from a public sphere in connection with the process of maintenance/restoration under the disaster. The feature and subject point of the process are clarified. The market economy order that is going to be produced in this process does the basic work and determines the economic order for another self-subsistence over life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents an analysis of the economic relationship between the two most important economies in Asia. Over the last decades, the Chinese and Japanese economies have become more economically interdependent, a development which will, in the long run, impact the countries' political relationship. The paper seeks to answer the question: How can China and Japan gain from the current economic situation, further enhance their relationship and increase their synergies for regional economic development? Data on trade and Foreign Direct Investment are used in combination with primary data from interviews with Japanese and Chinese companies on how they perceive the current business situation and future potential. The result of the data analysis shows that the countries have much to gain from their economic interdependence. The firms see great potential in their respective markets but are concerned about political turbulence. Three possible scenarios for the future economic relationship are presented, including fierce competition on all markets and a leveraging of resources for mutual development between Chinese and Japanese companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the development potential of rural and highly peripheral areas of Japan, focusing on local factors of development, together with local identity and cultural commodities, as these are incorporated into what has been called the culture economy. Based on a survey of informed local residents and another of local cultural commodities producers, the paper alludes to what constitutes a culture economy for rural settings and identifies several key aspects related to the process of such a cultural commodities-based approach to development. While confirming the importance of identity and cultural commodities in the local development profile of rural settings, the paper sets the groundwork for further research concerning the complex process for how such development can be achieved. The main themes identified for further research include both the nature and role of residents’ solidarity together with the combinative nature of government support and local entrepreneurship in the local culture economy on the one hand, and the character of the advertising and media representation by which cultural commodities are created and maintained on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the historical literature on the forms of industrialization has assumed that agriculture and industry must develop along separate and specialized lines, linked only at the macro level through inter-sectoral resource transfers. This paper uses the Japanese historical case, combined with the recognition, in much work on contemporary developing and developed countries, of the significance of diversification as a rural household strategy, to argue that a pattern of industrialization based on micro-level complementarity between agricultural and non-agricultural activities is possible. After summarizing the changing characteristics of the diversification pursued by Japanese rural households since the nineteenth century, the paper seeks to demonstrate that technical and organizational change in agriculture and rural industry can be seen as conditioning each other to produce the inter-connected structure of flexible manufacturing and small-scale, ‘part-time’ farming on which the significant role of the rural sector in Japan's economic growth has been based. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural hazards have a potentially large impact on economic growth, but measuring their economic impact is subject to a great deal of uncertainty. The central objective of this paper is to demonstrate a model--the natural disasters vulnerability evaluation (NDVE) model--that can be used to evaluate the impact of natural hazards on gross national product growth. The model is based on five basic indicators--natural hazards growth rates (αi), the national natural hazards vulnerability rate (ΩT), the natural disaster devastation magnitude rate (π), the economic desgrowth rate (i.e. shrinkage of the economy) (δ), and the NHV surface. In addition, we apply the NDVE model to the north-east Japan earthquake and tsunami of March 2011 to evaluate its impact on the Japanese economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines if the effects of agglomeration economies are manifested in technical efficiency and generate faster economic growth and higher (lower) levels of employment (unemployment). Using the prefecture level data for each of the two-digit groups of industries in Japan, it estimates a region-specific technical efficiency index based on the stochastic frontier production function framework. The factor analysis shows that in most of the industry-groups, efficiency has a positive association with external scale variable(s). Though the relationship is not very strong, it would be erroneous to ignore the effect of agglomeration economies on efficiency. For some light goods industries, the agglomeration effect is relatively stronger. Economic growth varies positively with external scale variable(s) and the unemployment rate tends to fall with respect to growth and concentration. This suggests that measures against industrial concentration may be counter-productive, particularly in the context of globalization when countries greatly need to raise productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main objective of this paper is to overview the developments of Japan's ODA and assess, in a quantitative manner, their economic impacts on Asian countries. The benefits of two alternative measures—one from capital formation by Japan's ODA loans and the other from import liberalization in the Japanese market—are compared. Those economy-wide impacts of aid and trade on six Asian countries—China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam—are estimated by a CGE model of global trade, incorporating a certain mechanism of dynamic capital formation. Japan's ODA loans are effective for economic growth in the countries. Real GDP gains range from 0.1 to 1.6% annually. Trade liberalization is efficient to improve economic welfare. Utility gains range from 0.2 to 1.9%, which exceed those on account of Japan's ODA. Variations in those economic impacts are much more significantly observed when examined by sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aims of this paper are: first, to review the two approaches — the regime and the corporate-centred system approaches — commonly used to examine the Japanese welfare state, pointing out their strengths and limits in explaining welfare development in Japan, particularly in recent years; and second, to examine recent development in Japanese welfare by focusing on a mix of social, demographic and economic factors which are contributing to the recent shifts. The Japanese welfare state is currently at a new turning point. There has been some deliberate redesigning of the welfare system over the last decade, which has resulted in visible changes. However, despite the apparent changes, the underlying thinking about social welfare in Japan remains largely unchanged: postwar Japanese social welfare developed in tandem with economic growth. Although the recent pattern of welfare expansion in the midst of the worsening economy does appear to diverge from the pattern established since the end of World War II, it is in fact completely in keeping with the basic idea. A closer examination into factors such as the demographic ageing of the population, the increase in married women's labour market participation rate, the demand for low-wage flexible labour, and the restructuring of the economy in terms of more global competition and greater pressures for companies to cut costs, have together created conditions in which the established postwar model of family and corporate-centred welfare arrangements can no longer be effectively sustained. The outcome is an expansion in public welfare and services as the state takes on a greater role and responsibility in providing and coordinating social welfare. This shift, however, is not necessarily a sign that Japanese people have achieved greater citizenship rights as understood in some of the western welfare states; rather, it should be viewed as primarily a purposeful strategy aimed at facilitating economic growth. The current expansion in social welfare in Japan, therefore, can be seen as a state investment to help families and the corporate sector prepare and reorganize themselves for the new economic order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a hypothesis that Japan's rapid economic growth was achieved through a unique combination of neoclassical elements, implying competitiveness and efficiency, and antineoclassical elements, implying growth preference in corporate decisionmakings. First a model of economic growth is presented to establish a theoretical link between management motivation and economic growth, and then industrial organization, internal labor markets, and capital markets in Japan are investigated in comparison to those in the United States in order to substantiate the hypothesis above. We also argue that the faster economic growth in Germany over the United Kingdom can be explained in a similar fashion, and discuss the implications to economic and antitrust policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applying the lag-augmented vector autoregression approach developed by Toda and Yamamoto (1995), we analyse the causal relationships among GDP, private capital, transport user cost, and port capital in Japan, and investigates the dynamic and accumulated effects of port capital formation on other variables from 1966 to 1997. Results from our analysis indicate that the causal relationships between port capital and other variables are significant. Port capital development leads to accrual of considerable magnitudes of both flow and stock effects. We conclude that structural economic effects of forming port capital are substantial for Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]