Why did Japan stop growing?

*Please note REGISTRATIONS ARE NOW CLOSED.

**Please also note the venue has been changed to the Weston Theatre, level 1, JG Crawford Building 132, Lennox Crossing, ANU

This public lecture is based on Professor Takeo Hoshi’s NIRA

The third ANU-Japan workshop on public economics

This two day workshop will take place from 2-5pm Wednesday 27 March and 9am-1pm Thursday 28 March. It will bring together leading public economists from Japan and Australia to ANU for the third time and be organised in conference-style sessions, providing a forum for the discussion of issues at the forefront of public economics.

Participants include:

Why research the Japanese economy?

As Japan rapidly grew in the 1960s and 1970s, interests on the Japanese economy grew tremendously. The research community followed the growth of public interests, and provided valuable insights into the functioning of the Japanese economy. With the decline in the relative importance of the Japanese economy in the world, however, research interests on the Japanese economy subsided.

Given this backdrop, what significance can a research on the Japanese economy have in economics?

Crawford Award Winner 2012, Railroad expansion and entrepreneurship: Evidence from Meiji Japan

Railroads in Meiji Japan are credited with facilitating factor mobility as well as access to human and financial capital, but the impact on firm activity is unclear. In this seminar, Dr John Tang will assesse the effect of railroad access on startup activity across Japanese prefectures by using a newly developed firm-level dataset and a difference-in-differences model that exploits the temporal and spatial variation of railroad expansion.

Household welfare impacts of natural and manmade disasters in Korea and Japan

People in both developed and developing countries face a variety of unexpected events. Large scale natural and manmade disasters generate the most devastating outcomes. Based on household micro-data, Professor Yasuyuki Sawada will compare two manmade disasters, the 1997-98 financial crises in Korea and Japan as well as two natural disasters in Japan, the Great Hanshin Awaji (Kobe) earthquake in 1995 and Chuetsu earthquake in 2004. The impact of each disaster on household welfare is differentiated due to heterogenous conditions.

Firm committment: Why the corporation is failing us and how to restore trust in it

The corporation is one of the most important and remarkable institutions in the world. It affects all our lives continuously. It feeds, entertains, houses and, employs us. It generates vast amounts of revenue for those who own it and it invests a substantial proportion of the wealth that we possess. But the corporation is also the cause of immense problems and suffering, a source of poverty and pollution, and its failures are increasing.

Japanese agriculture in 2020: Structural change, policy reform and prospects for TPP

Japan’s agricultural sector seems to be gradually adjusting to globalisation. The government recently introduced a series of new policies to induce young people to take up farming and to enlarge the scale of farm operations to 20-30 hectares per farm household. But the question is whether these approaches are sufficient to prepare for globalisation under the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (TPP) and other international movements towards freer trade.

The Second ANU-Japan Workshop on Public Economics

This workshop brings together leading public economists from Australia and Japan to discuss research at the forefront of public economics. The discussion topics include:
> the public goods provision in the global world
> the fiscal competition among countries and jurisdictions within a country
> the design of social security system, and the sustainability of government debts.


Speakers include:

> Richard Cornes, Research School of Economics, ANU
> Kazuki Hiraga, Keio University