Japan’s economic crisis and recovery

This panel will discuss the economic crisis from the coronavirus pandemic and the recovery strategy for Japan. How does COVID-19 change the economic outlook in Japan? Does a relatively high rate of corporate savings in major Japanese firms put them in a better position than their foreign rivals? Will Japan’s large government debt and limited capacity for fiscal expansion constrain the recovery process?

Juvenile delinquency and prefectural ordinances: evidence from Japanese panel data

Japan is experiencing unprecedented population aging. Therefore, as the younger age population declines, there will be increased importance placed on the development of youth in Japanese society. Youth protection education ordinance aims to promote the healthy development of people by restricting their access to inappropriate published material or harmful environments. While each prefecture manages prefectural ordinances of juvenile protection, it is not enough to evaluate the effectiveness of these ordinances from an economics aspect.

Bayesian and decomposition analysis for health inequality in Japan

A severely ageing population is confronting Japan. Health conditions, particularly among aged people, are attracting more concern. Health inequality in Japan is a topic as important as income inequality.

Using the self-reported health data in Japan, the study analyses health inequality. The data collected is ordinal categorical data, that is, qualitative data. The study calculates the inequality index in Japan based on ordinal categorical health data and decomposes the health inequality by age groups and sexes using the Bayesian method.

Autonomous vehicles in the Japanese criminal justice system: emerging new trends

Autonomous vehicle (AV), or connected autonomous vehicle (CAV), is one of the hottest issues among Japanese policymakers these days. Given the importance of future mobility in an aging Japanese society and the enormous presence of the automobile industry in a declining Japanese economy, this phenomenon is pretty understandable.

Japan Update 2019: Leadership in a time of uncertainty

The Australia Japan Research Centre and ANU Japan Institute is proud to host the 2019 annual Japan Update conference — Leadership in a Time of Uncertainty — on Wednesday 4 September in the Molonglo Theatre, Crawford School of Public Policy.

Japan has entered a new Reiwa era with the new Emperor.

Getting the Australia-China relationship right

There is no more important issue for Australia in its trade and foreign affairs than to get the relationship with China right. Despite negative comments about the health of the relationship, the trade and economic relationship has flourished over the last two years since the Australia-China Joint Economic Report was completed in 2016. The political relationship has languished.

House price and credit cycles: Effects of global liquidity and risk perception

This presentation explores the determinants of house prices and bank credit. An empirical analysis of panel data of 22 developed countries during 1990–2015 reveals cross-border bank inflows and risk perception in global markets as the key drivers of house prices and bank credit. Moreover, it indicates that the effect of this risk perception on house prices is non-linear, depending on the leverage of local financial systems: it is stronger in economies with higher leveraged financial sectors.

The emergence of a parallel world: The misperception problem for bank balance sheet risk and lending behaviour

We examine the reason that there have coexisted the two opposing views on distressed banks’ lending behaviour in Japan’s post-bubble period: the one is the stagnant lending in a capital crunch and the other is the forbearance lending to low-quality borrowers. To this end, we address the measurement problem for bank balance sheet risk.

Evaluating willingness to pay for clean air: Evidence from a quasi-experiment in Japan

Do people pay for cleaner air? This paper measures the extent to which a reduction in ambient concentrations of suspended particulate matter (SPM) increased residential land prices in metropolitan areas in Japan. I exploit quasi-experimental conditions under Automobile NOx Control Law (ANCL) to induce exogenous changes in SPM, analysing property-level panel dataset for 1992-2015. In this presentation, I show preliminary estimates of marginal willingness to pay for cleaner air, and calculate economic benefits of the ANCL.