can japan make a comeback fter being the best performer in the oecd during the preceding 40 years japan has experienced economic stagnation since the beginning of the 1990s what has happened to the japanese economy can it make a comeback as a fastgrowing economy what is required in terms of economic policy japan is the second largest economy in the world it is the largest or second largest importer of most raw materials and it owns more foreign assets than any other country what happens to the japanese economy is therefore of great importance not only for the japanese but also for the entire world

china s membership in the world trade organization wto and the exports of the developing economies of east asia a computable general equilibrium approach there is a general perception particularly among the developing countries of east asia that china s wto membership would spell bad news for their exports the asean countries in particular are quite concerned about its likely negative impact on their export and growth potentials in this light the main objective of this paper is to empirically assess the trade implications of china s wto membership for these countries only few studies using a computable general equilibrium cge approach have addressed the issue of china s wto membership trade implications further these studies have not adequately addressed the issue from the perspective of the developing countries of east asia particularly the asean countries using the latest version of the global trade analysis project gtap model and based on the latest tariff reduction commitments by china the results showed that contrary to the current perception and previous studies almost all of the developing countries of east asia are likely to benefi

price relations between export and domestic rice markets in thailand abstract many rice importing countries argue that rice exporting nations isolate their domestic markets through the use of stabilization pricing policies which cause international rice markets to become excessively volatile for the argument to hold any weight price transmission between exporting countries domestic and export markets should be unidirectional whereby export prices are driven by domestic prices but domestic prices are not affected by export prices the study tests the hypothesis on thailand traditionally the world s largest rice exporter the results from the causality tests are not entirely clear however the results from the impulse response functions show that while the shocks originating in the domestic market are higher in magnitude in the export market in the short run the shocks originating in the export market are more persistent in the domestic market this suggests that although thailand s domestic policies are somewhat effective in the immediate months after the shock they allow price transmission from its export market to transfer over to its domestic market in the long run the results therefore imply that thailand s domestic pricing programs are not heavily distorting world rice markets

the welfare implications of trade liberalisation between the southern mediterranean and the eu the impact on the southern mediterranean countries smc of the current process of trade liberalization with the european union is explored the methodology is that of computable general equilibrium modelling under imperfect competition and the model includes ten countries and 11 sectors this allows for both a cross country and cross sectoral analysis of the results the experiments considered are the full liberalization of tariffs as well as changes in market access and trade induced changes in productivity a key feature of the paper is that the phased introduction of tariff reductions is allowed for as explicitly envisaged in the agreements the results show that the process of liberalization may have a substantial though non monotonic impact on the smc economies in terms of both changes in production and through this on welfare the welfare impact is potentially very high in particular for the high tariff economies the sources of the welfare gain tend to derive from perfectly competitive explanat

sit down at the ball game how trade barriers make the world less food secure this paper analyses the impacts of trade policy responses to rising world food prices by carrying out a series of stylised experiments in the wheat market using a world trade model gtap the sequence of events that is modelled comprises a negative wheat supply shock and subsequent implementation of an export tax by a major net exporter and a reduction in import tariffs by a small importer the effects of trade policy responses are contrasted with those of full liberalisation of the wheat market at the core are the opposite effects on producers and consumers as well as the terms of trade and trade tax revenue effects food security is shown to depend crucially on changes in prices but also in incomes that are associated with changes in factor returns the results reveal that major net exporters are generally better off when implementing export taxes for food security purposes large exporting countries export price instability causing world food prices to rise further net importing countries lose out and have limited leeway to reduce tariffs or subsidise imports liberalising wheat trade mitigates rising prices and contributes to food security but to the detriment of production in africa and asia making them more dependent on and vulnerable to changes in the world market concerted action at the wto forum is required notably clarifying and sharpening the rules regarding export measures

the effects of eu corn cotton and sugar beet policies on greek producers a multimarket analysis this article examines the welfare effects of the european union s common agricultural policy cap corn cotton and sugar beet regimes practiced in greece after its 1981 entry into the european union since greek farmers produce corn cotton and sugar beets on the same land in different years we model these markets as horizontally linked by incorporating the demand for corn in our model we take into account that corn is used as feed in livestock production we use line integral theory to properly deal with the complications of welfare measurement in a multimarket setting we estimate producer welfare effects of greek corn cotton and sugar beet policy and use bootstrapping techniques to obtain confidence intervals for the welfare measurements our analysis indicates that the income transfers to greek farmers corn cotton and sugar beet growers as well as livestock producers considered as a total rose between 1981 and 1992 the 1992 cap reform led to a stabilization of income transfers to crop farmers and lessened the negative impact on livestock producers

prudential regulation and the credit crunch evidence from japan the underlying causes of sharp declines in bank lending during recessions in large developed economies as exemplified by the u s in the early 1990s and japan in the late 1990s are still being debated due to the lack of any convincing identification strategy of the supply side capital lending relationship from lending demand using within bank share of real estate lending in the late 1980s as an instrumental variable for bank capital we find that japanese banks cut back on their lending in response to a large loss of bank capital in fiscal year 1997

endogenous price policies and international wheat prices vanzetti and kennedy s herein vk comment on our earlier paper sarris and freebairn gives us the opportunity first to clarify the differences in the models to present a generalization of the analysis that includes their results as well as ours as special cases and then to point out some salient features of our model that seem to have been unnoticed by them consider our model of a homogenous commodity produced consumed and traded by n countries which are characterized by the following linear demand and supply curves notation follows vk except that we maintain the additive random variables and hence keep the time subscript

market structure and spells of employment and unemployment evidence from the construction sector in egypt summary this paper investigates the links between market structure and spells of employment and unemployment in the construction sector in egypt using an augmented job search framework two key features of the model are the reservation frontier which allows for a trade off between wages and expected duration of employment and the dependency of unemployment durations on expected employment durations and expected wages these as well as conjectures concerning the influence of demand side forces obtained from the expressions for the transition rates out of employment and unemployment are examined using weibull log logistic and generalized gamma parameterizations of the hazard rate the parametric assumptions are exploited to resolve problems associated with selectivity and use of generated regressors

price stabilization and impacts of trade liberalization in the southeast asian rice market abstract a global rice model using a partial equilibrium framework is used to investigate the impact of trade liberalization in major rice trading countries of southeast asia focusing on the price stabilization mechanism that has long been adopted by governments in indonesia malaysia and the philippines the simulation results suggest that the removal of state trading enterprises in these three countries would lower their domestic prices by as much as 34 but increase the world prices by about 20 when free trade liberalization is realized in 2020 domestic prices decline further in indonesia and the philippines leading to an increase in their imports which are estimated to be as much as 4 5 million tons the impact on domestic prices however is absorbed nearly evenly among indonesia the philippines thailand and vietnam

dynamic oligopoly in the rice export market a linear quadratic dynamic oligopoly model is used to estimate the competitiveness of the rice export market the model nests various market structures using either open loop or feedback strategies the estimated feedback model implies a less competitive market structure than the estimated open loop model the rice export market is oligopolistic but it is closer to competitive than collusive copyright 1989 by mit press

crop failure price regulation and emergency imports of japan s rice sector in 1993 in 1993 an extraordinarily cool summer in japan brought about low rice yields which caused considerable disturbances to the rice markets japan imported a large amount of rice as an emergency measure two controversies about japan s rice policies were raised particularly in that period the first centred on the effectiveness of the price regulation policies in stabilizing rice prices and farmers incomes the second involved the newspapers arguments that the emergency imports harmed other countries especially developing countries these controversies were examined with a world trade computable general equilibrium model

estimation of equilibrium wage distributions with heterogeneity summary equilibrium search models generalize the one sided models used earlier by endogenizing the wage offer distribution attempts to estimate versions of these equilibrium n search models have been unsuccessful ironically because the predicted wage distribution did not fit the wage data in this paper we extend the applicability of search models by introducing firm heterogeneity to account for the shape of the wage density the resulting estimation problem is difficult but we propose a solution and illustrate its feasibility and performance with a monte carlo study and an application to us labour market data

retrospective on the bubble period and its relationship to developments in the 1990s in reviewing what happened in the 1980s in japan and how the bursting of the bubble created problems in the early 1990s the following conclusions are obtained 1 in order to limit damage to the economy from a bubble and its bursting it is important to build a resilient financial system through strict supervision policy so that asset price fluctuations would not weaken financial institutions supervision policy would include regulatory measures limiting lending concentration and exposure to real estate related sectors 2 monetary policy should pay attention to asset price movements but it may be difficult and inappropriate to raise the interest rate sharply when inflation is low below one per cent like in japan even though asset prices are increasing at 30 40 per cent 3 the official discount rate could have been raised in the summer of 1988 in japan when the federal reserve and bundesbank raised interest rates this would have slowed down the rise of stock and land prices but the bubble was already large by then 4 the bubble in the second half of the 1980s was only partially responsible for the lost decade of the 1990s in japan a series of policy errors made a small problem of the burst bubble much bigger than necessary

domestic and international impacts of the rice trade policy reform in the philippines abstract faced with high domestic rice prices that have fueled inflation above the 2018 target and penalized poor consumers the most the government of the philippines has decided to abandon the quantitative restrictions on imports and replace them with tariffs this paper uses a global rice model based on a partial equilibrium framework to assess the possible impacts of this reform on imports production consumption and prices in contrast with past similar studies we address three key concerns i the heterogeneity in farm price across 16 regions in response to the combined effect of the tarriffication and the average historical trend in productivity increase at 1 5 between 2001 and 2018 ii the differentiation of imports by origin partly due to the different tariffs applied to countries within and beyond the association of south east asian nations and iii the effect on domestic prices in third countries the simulation results suggest that the reform would increase imports by 2 47 million tons 20 7 in 2019 we also find a large decline in farm prices and retail prices respectively by php 6 1 kg 30 1 and php 7 6 kg 17 4 in 2019 that explains an increase in rice consumption we estimate the fall in total inflation at 1 2 in 2019 but less over time further the large fall in farm prices in 2019 is shared quite evenly among regions in the short term but returns to pre reform levels in the near term using a higher price elasticity of supply for one region obtained from panel data surveys we show a more pronounced decline in production than the national average such differentiated results confirm the relevance of using a regionally disaggregated model to design more targeted policies we also show a slight increase in world prices which led to small increases in the domestic prices of south and southeast asian rice markets while this reform is largely pro poor consumers policy makers would need to use the additional tariff revenue to help rice growers either increase their competitiveness and modernize their rice production or shift to other crops

the effect of bank credit on asset prices evidence from the japanese real estate boom during the 1980s bernanke bs 2001 am econ rev v91 p253 doi 10 1257 aer 91 2 253 cargill thomas 2000 financial policy cen gerlach s 2005 j bank financ v29 p461 doi 10 1016 j jbankfin 2004 05 015 hoshi t 2000 nber macroecon annu v14 p129 hoshi t 1993 4421 nber hoshi t 2001 monetary ec studies v19 p1 hutchison m 1997 political ec japanes ito t 1996 monetary ec studies v14 p143 ito t 2004 japans lost decade o p17 kindleberger c 1978 financial crises the kitagawa h 1994 financial dev japan p81 kiyotaki n 1997 j polit econ v105 p211 doi 10 1086 262072 peek j 2000 am econ rev v90 p30 doi 10 1257 aer 90 1 30 petersen ma 2002 j financ v57 p2533 doi 10 1111 1540 6261 00505 ueda k 2000 crisis change japane p59 ueda k 1994 japanese main bank s p89 weinstein de 1998 j financ v53 p635 doi 10 1111 0022 1082 254893

wto negotiations on agriculture and the distributional impacts for us rice farm households abstract the policies of wealthy countries have proven the most difficult to reform in the wto doha round negotiations considerable emphasis has been placed on developing country impacts but a gap in the literature remains on the stakes for rich country farmers despite the large role these countries play in global agricultural protection the research here considers the particular case of us rice households and their sensitivity to japanese market access reform using an applied general equilibrium model with multiple farm households we highlight the distributional impacts among these producers we argue that concessions to japan on market access make domestic reforms in rice a difficult political sale in the us since the wealthiest producers bear the largest losses improving our understanding of the distributional impacts and political realities of the richest countries is critical to informing the negotiating process because the gains to the world s poor can only be realized with creative policy redress in these rich nations

the effects of trade liberalisation abstract the liberalisation of agricultural trade has been an important component of the uruguay round of multilateral trade negotiations under the gatt a considerable amount of research effort has been expended on estimating the costs of agricultural protectionism most of this activity has been based on a partial equilibrium framework with conventional quantification of the distributive benefits and costs to be expected from liberalisation attempts at general equilibrium analysis have been fewer but provide evidence of the economy wide gains from the removal of protection whilst these analyses have had a powerful influence on the nature of the political discussions on agricultural trade policy they have not helped define the details of politically acceptable alternatives to current agricultural supports the reasons are the technical economic data and statistical problems which restrict the interpretation of results to broad generalisations and the failure of analyses to focus on the most important political concerns indicating these concerns may help define the focus of future research but it is doubted if conventional economic analysis has very much more to offer

the distributional effect of the rice policy in japan 1986 2010 abstract this study aims to evaluate the distributional effect of the governmental rice policy in japan on producers consumers and government expenditures from 1986 to 2010 using a partial equilibrium model policy measures include government purchase of rice output payment and acreage control the simulation result shows that acreage control has been the principal policy measure for transferring income to producers especially since the enforcement of the wto agreement on agriculture acreage control is the policy measure with the lowest total efficiency and highest budgetary efficiency this result implies that the government s goal of transferring income to producers with minimum government cost has been achieved through a combination of policy measures

does agricultural trade liberalization increase risks of supply side uncertainty effects of productivity shocks and export restrictions on welfare and food supply in japan abstract agriculture is the focus of much contention in free trade negotiations the japanese government is against liberalizing the rice trade on the grounds that it would threaten national food security in the events of such shocks as crop failure and embargoes trade liberalization is expected to make the japanese economy more dependent upon food imports and thus more susceptible to these risks using a computable general equilibrium model with a monte carlo simulation we quantify the welfare impacts of productivity shocks and export quotas by major rice exporters to japan and found little evidence of japan suffering from such shocks

judging agricultural policies a survey this survey provides a structured picture of 40 years of literature which uses welfare economic tools to judge agricultural policy challenges and developments of normative agricultural policy analysis are discussed in an easily accessible graphical framework it is shown how the literature has gone from examining a very small discrete set of simple policies to a much broader often continuous set of policies that combine policy instruments simultaneously the importance of the pareto criterion used to explore the limits of how government can affect welfare is revealed moreover given the importance of the objective of income redistribution in agricultural policy agricultural economists have often departed from the purely efficiency oriented tradition in economics it is shown that they have tried to incorporate equity considerations by either adding these criteria as constraints to the social welfare function or directly incorporating these criteria in the functional form of the social welfare function

a computable general equilibrium model of the southern region of taiwan the impact of the tainan science based industrial park the primary modelling tools used to analyse regional economic issues include econometric forecasting models fixed price input output i o multi sector models social accounting matrix sam and computable general equilibrium cge models cge models combine the advantages of econometric i o models and sam strengthening the theoretical basis of the modelling effort and thus enabling more precise policy analysis current cge literature includes models used to analyse international trade tax reform energy and environment issues however application of this technique on a regional scale is rare in the scientific literature in this paper a small regional computable general equilibrium model is constructed and applied to analyse the economic impact of constructing tainan science based industrial park tsbip locating in southern taiwan the research results provide a valuable reference for decision makers in formulating industrial and regional policies as well as helping business managers with strateg

efficient redistribution through commodity markets efficiency in redistribution is measured in terms of deadweight loss generated per dollar of economic surplus transferred between consumers and producers of a commodity by means of market intervention the implications of supply and demand elasticities for efficiency in redistribution are examined with special attention to the comparison of production control and deficiency payment programs the results may be used to aid in the evaluation of commodity programs and as a basis for consideration of the hypothesis that observed policies are efficient given the political power of interest groups

goals and consequences of rice policy in japan 1965 80 the change in welfare of producers and consumers government cost and the deadweight loss arising from the various forms of government interventions into the rice market in order to protect domestic producers in japan are estimated in a partial equilibrium framework results of the quantitative analysis indicate that the motivation of the government was to minimize budget costs in achieving the target level of producer price support while consumer welfare had an insignificant weight in the government s objective function it is aiso found that acreage control is a second best policy to reduce social inefficiency produced from other forms of market distortions

investment behaviour in transition countries and computable general equilibrium models when applying computable general equilibrium cge models to transition economies it is not plausible to use the standard assumption that the base year data represent stable structural characteristics or even the steady state of the economy the suggestions forwarded until now to overcome this problem are discussed in this article an amendment is proposed by modifying the investment modelling within the dynamic cge setting the standard formulation of installation costs for capital is extended through the inclusion of adjustment costs that depend on the change of the investment level such formulation of the adjustment costs within the dynamic cge model leads to an investment behaviour that mirrors the empirical data of the first years of the transition

carbon emissions control and trade liberalization coordinated approaches to taiwan s trade and tax policy abstract in recent years several studies have emerged on the possible reconciliation between trade and environmental policies however little attention has been devoted to inquiring about the economic implications of the linkages of these policies in the newly industrialized countries the so called nics in this paper we investigate the joint effects of trade and environmental policies on the taiwan economy the estimates are derived from a five household 18 sector computable general equilibrium model calibrated to a 1995 social accounting matrix our empirical results based on taiwan s data show that tariff elimination can significantly reduce the costs of carbon emissions control and possibly offset welfare reductions due to implementation of a carbon tax our findings reveal that the coordination of trade liberalization with the introduction of targeted environmental policies enhances factor relocation towards competitive industries they are broadly consistent with those cases of developing countries reported in previous studies

modelling hierarchical consumer preferences an application to global food markets in the literature considerable attention has been devoted to the relationship between consumer preference and a product s country of origin papadopoulos 1993 and it is well established that the latter has an influence on quality perceptions bilkey and nes 1982 whilst empirical studies have tended to concentrate on manufactured goods there is evidence that food products exhibit strong countryof origin characteristics bonnet and simioni 2001 scarpa et al 2001 van der lans et al 2001 and furthermore that consumers typically favour domestic food varieties over foreign substitutes quagrainie et al 1998 unterschultz et al 1998 with international trade in food expanding rapidly in global markets and consumers facing an unprecedented level of variety product country images are assuming greater significance skaggs et al 1996 more importantly policy initiatives to promote regional foods and product awareness within europe peri and gaeta 1999 coupled with the growing antiglobalization sentiments of some sections of society are likely to have implications for international trade by reinforcing consumer preference for domestically produced varieties and strengthening any preference barrier effect much of the recent literature on quantitative analysis of international trade is set in the context of general equilibrium accordingly against a background of continuing liberalization of world markets and with further reforms anticipated under wto world trade organization negotiations a method of modelling endogenous hierarchical ranked consumer preferences is reported based on region of origin within a computable general equilibrium cge framework this extends the treatment of endogenous product differentiation in cge models and adds an extra dimension to the exogenous region of origin approach maintained under the commonly adopted armington assumption the first part of the paper reports technical implementation of patriotic preference in imperfectly competitive food markets this is then followed by an empirical illustration in which the impact on trade flows is isolated

impacts of liberalizing trade in the world rice market a multi product quadratic programming model is used to investigate impacts of trade liberalization on the world rice market recognizing product differentiation and allowing substitution among various rice types and qualities model simulations predict a large increase in both trade volumes and prices for all rice types and a significant welfare gain for most rice exporters and importers japan south korea philippines taiwan and brazil would be the major importers trade liberalization would increase total u s export revenue by 109 movement to free trade by japan has significant effects on world rice trade and on japanese rice production

impact of rice tariffication on japan and the world rice market the uruguay round agreement of the world trade organization wto and other trade agreements such as nafta and mercosur have contributed to the increase in u s and world rice trade since 1994 rice however continues to be one of the most highly protected agricultural commodities with current tariff rates in several developing countries ranging from 50 to 230 protectionist policies for rice include tariffs tariff rate quotas state trading and various domestic government programs amponsah colyer and jolly before implementation of the uruguay round agreement japan and south korea maintained an almost complete ban on rice imports to begin opening these markets the uruguay round provided special minimum market access ma rules with the goal of eventually shifting to tariffication the grace period for tariffication was set at six years for japan 1995 to 2000 and ten years for south korea 1995 to 2004 south korea received additional time for tariffication and a lower

connected we stand a network perspective on trade and global food security we analyze the link between virtual water trade that is the flow of water embodied in the international trade of agricultural goods and vulnerability to external shocks from the vantage point of network analysis while a large body of work has shown that virtual water trade can enhance water saving on a global scale being especially beneficial to arid countries there are increasing concerns that openness makes countries more dependent on foreign food suppliers and in this way more prone to external shocks our evidence reveals that the increased globalization witnessed in the last three decades is not associated with the increased frequency of adverse shocks in food production furthermore building on recent advances in network analysis that connect the stability of a complex system to its topological features we find that the world is more interconnected but not necessarily less stable

food insecurity income inequality and the changing comparative advantage in world agriculture i would like to argue in this article that in the process of economic development in land poor countries in asia agriculture faces three distinctly different problems food insecurity sectoral income inequality and the declining food self sufficiency associated with the declining comparative advantage in agriculture at the high income stage massive imports of food grains to asia if they occur will aggravate the world food shortage which will have significant implications for the poverty incidence in the world i argue that in order to avoid such a tragedy asia should expand farm size to reduce labor cost by adopting large scale mechanization sub saharan africa should realize a green revolution in grain production and latin america should further expand its grain production capacity

regulation in the u s rice industry 1965 89 a partial equilibrium framework is used to estimate the deadweight loss arising from government intervention in the u s rice market in order to protect domestic producers the efficiency of the rice program is compared to other grain programs deadweight losses relative to taxpayer and consumer costs from rice programs in recent years were only slightly higher compared to the same measure associated with major commodity programs the primary source of deadweight losses in rice programs result from set asides the potential savings from completely decoupling the rice program are estimated to reach 387 million for 1987

the impact of tariff liberalization between the united states and mexico an empirical analysis a computable general equilibrium cge model of the us is constructed in order to simulate the impact of tariff liberalization between the united state and mexico following the implementation of the north american free trade agreement nafta we find that although this agreement will have a minimal effect on the us economy as a whole certain sectors and regions may experience substantial gain and losses overall however the treaty should increase economic welfare and enhance economic growth

an applied general equilibrium analysis of the economic effects of tourism in a quite small quite open economy a computable general equilibrium model is used to project the effects of tourism on the industrial and regional structures of the australian economy the most striking conclusion is that queensland usually thought to be the most tourism oriented of the australian states would be a net loser from an economy wide expansion of tourism as well as having a relatively large share of its gsp accounted for by tourist oriented activities queensland is also relatively heavily dependent on agriculture and mining traditional export sectors which are crowded out by the expansion of international tourism

unemployment insurance rules joblessness and part time work developed and under general conditions an increase in the disregard is shown to increase both the part time and overall re employment hazards data from the current population survey s displaced worker supplements are used to test these predictions estimates from a competing risks model with correlated risks and time varying coefficients shows that increasing the disregard significantly increases the conditional probability of part time re employment during the first three months of joblessness

the effects of domestic rice market interventions outside business as usual conditions for imported rice prices the philippine government intervenes in the domestic rice market through the imposition of import tariffs and the provision of producer and consumer subsidies while policymakers are aware that these programmes come with allocative efficiency costs they justify the programmes on the grounds that they insulate the domestic economy from unexpected price spikes in the international rice market an interesting matter for policy evaluation is to quantify the insulation benefit that the programmes provide in circumstances of sudden severe import price spikes to examine this question we undertake a dynamic computable general equilibrium cge simulation in which the philippines is subject to an external rice price shock we find that the insulation benefit of the support programmes under a 2008 like event is worth approximately 0 10 of real consumption however the cost of insuring against these price spikes is significant we estimate the annual cost of the rice market interventions at approximately 0 40