Presentations

As the U.S. federal budget deficit has increased dramatically since 2001, the twin deficits are re-emerging as a much-discussed topic. Nevertheless, the FRB executives argue that the people should pay more attention to the current account deficit rather than to the twin deficits as a pair. Their contention that the aging population in many advanced economies outside the U.S. is a significant factor underlying the dearth of domestic investment in those countries turned out to be well-founded. However, we failed to find any concrete evidence to support the claim that it is the direct cause of the global saving glut.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the outcome of the introduction of euro from the perspective of the flow of funds between the leading countries of the world. The data used in this study have been prepared from the International Banking Statistics (IBS) published by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). To educe only the direct effects of the launch of euro, we have opted for the mixed effects model. The basic formula of our model is that of the gravity model widely used in the analysis of the international trade. The technical contribution of this paper is that the mixed effects model is proved to be an effective instrument to investigate a nested panel data. The specification could be easily examined by the likelihood ratio tests by decomposing the model into fixed and random effects elements. Since all the fixed effects parameters estimated in the mixed effects model has been proved to be statistically significant, we used the parameters to educe the following practical implications. As a conclusion it can be said that the success of the introduction of euro might be a little overstated. Especially the prosperity of the non-euro EU countries could be short-lived. The inauguration of the new currency will surely benefit the euro area, but the effects on the non-euro members of EU is not clear as suggested in the casual observations.

The frequency of foreign exchange intervention by the Ministry of Finance of Japan (MOF) increased dramatically between 2001 and 2004. The Bank of Japan (BOJ) acting as the agency of MOF has also intervened in the short-term money market by itself, from time to time, to sterilize the yen flooding into it. However, the effectiveness of the operations could be different from one type of operation from the other because the transactions taken place between the monetary authorities and the private sectors are completely different. It is why we have employed asset-liability-matrix (ALM) derived from the flow-of-funds accounts to evaluate the effectiveness of each type of operations.

経済全体の資金の流れを鳥瞰するひとつの方法として貸借対照表形式の資金循環表を制度部門間の取引表形式に組替えた金融連関表を提案している。これによって資金がどの主体からどの主体に流れているのかを見てとることができる。本稿ではその作表方法を解説するとともに、金融構造をより立体的に把握できるよう、産業連関分析に対応した三角化とレオンティフ逆行列の分析をおこなっている。