Published papers

This paper proposes replacing the present Basel capital requirement with a new counter-cyclical measure. Optimally, (i) the Basel capital requirement ratio should depend on various economic factors such as the cyclical stage of GDP, credit growth, stock prices, interest rates, and land prices-hence, avoiding the expansion of bank loans during a boom period and a credit crunch during a sluggish period (ii) the Basel minimum capital requirement rule should be different from country to country since the economic structures and the behavior of banks are different and (iii) crossborder bank operation should follow the minimum capital requirement ratio where bank lending activities occur rather than the origin of the source of funds. © 2011 The Earth Institute at Columbia University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This chapter will, first of all, describe how the flow of funds in Japan functions. Second, it explains how Hometown Investment Trust (HIT) funds can fund businesses that are likely to grow in future and are capable of making a social contribution, but entail risks. HIT funds have recently begun to grow, and we will make the case for the urgent need to foster such funds. There are two main reasons why this is important. First, as BIS capital adequacy requirements become more stringent worldwide, banks find it more difficult to provide funding to high-risk businesses and projects. Second, Japan's public finances are in dire straits. Local businesses outside the main urban centres used to be supported by subsidies from the centre to local regions in the form of national tax revenues allocated to local governments, national treasury disbursements, and government loan and investment funds. Under today's expanding fiscal deficits, however, issuance of deficit-financing bonds to provide for local regions has reached a limit, and the need to use private-sector funds to finance regional projects has become urgent (Yoshino and Mizoguchi, Financial policy review, Ministry of Finance of Japan, 2013 McNelis and Yoshino, Advs Complex Syst 15:1250057, 2012). The second half of this chapter will describe the flow of funds in Asia. Chapter 5 of this book will discuss concrete examples in Asia, where the financial systems also rely heavily on indirect financing via banks, so that the supply of funds to risk sectors is very likely to taper off. It is necessary to create mechanisms to supply various kinds of funds, including HIT funds that finance new corporations, businesses and environmental programs.

This paper applies Bayesian estimation to an open-economy Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model of Japan, to assess the effects of expanding government debt on interest rates, real exchange rate dynamics, and real sector performance. We find that the emergence of even a small risk premium on government debt will trigger considerable instability in the real and nominal variables. We show that a switch to an exchange-rate rule for monetary policy would considerably moderate the instability induced by a rising risk premium.

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.

This paper explores the internationalization and location pattern of Japanese financial service firms in East and Southeast Asia. During a period of prolonged economic problems in the Japanese domestic market and a turbulent period in Asia because of the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the situation for these service providers has changed drastically. The research question that the paper seeks to answer is: what are the spatial patterns and underlying reasons for strategic location response in Japanese financial service providers in East and Southeast Asia in the post-Asian financial crisis period? The paper puts forward a set of potential responses that these firms can pursue to strengthen their regional competitiveness.

This book records the first success stories of a new form of financial intermediation, the hometown investment fund, that has become a national strategy in Japan, partly to meet the need to finance small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) after the devastating earthquake and tsunami in March 2011. The hometown investment fund has three main advantages. First, it contributes to financial market stability by lowering information asymmetry. Individual households and firms have direct access to information about the borrowing firms, mainly SMEs, that they lend to. Second, it is a stable source of risk capital. The fund is project driven. Firms and households decide to invest by getting to know the borrowers and their projects. In this way the fund distributes risk but not so that it renders risk intractable, which was the problem with the originate and distribute model. Third, it contributes to economic recovery by connecting firms and households with SMEs that are worthy of their support. It also creates employment opportunities, at the SMEs as well as for the pool of retirees from financial institutions who can help assess the projects. Introduction of the hometown investment fund has huge global implications. The world is seeking a method of financial intermediation that minimizes information asymmetry, distributes risk without making it opaque, and contributes to economic recovery. Funds similar to Japan's hometown investment fund can succeed in all three ways. After all, the majority of the world's businesses are SMEs. The first chapter explains the theory behind this method, and the following chapters relate success stories from Japan and other parts of Asia. This book should encourage policymakers, economists, lenders, and borrowers, especially in developing countries, to adopt this new form of financial intermediation, thus contributing to global economic stability.

This paper studies how population aging affects economic performance and the effectiveness of fiscal and monetary policies. We develop a New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous households: workers and retirees. We demonstrate that an increase in the proportion of working population increases aggregate output, consumption, and investment by increasing total labor supply in the long run. It also increases wages and reduces the social security burden of the government. This paper also finds that the effectiveness of fiscal and monetary policies is weakened when the proportion of retirees becomes larger. (C) 2017 Published by Elsevier B.V.

Recently, there has been an increasing tendency for switching external debts into domestic borrowings in many developing countries. In this paper, we develop a simple general equilibrium model to determine the optimal share for domestic and external government debts in Indonesia. We emphasise the important role of demand in forming the optimal structure of government debts. We found that both domestic and external government debt markets are linked from both the perspectives of demand and supply. In addition, the back testing simulation suggests that the Indonesian government has to reduce the level of its external debt. Through a dynamic recursive simulation, it is suggested that, in the long run, the government must not hold any external debt while the debt-to-GDP ratio is at the 16%-17% level.

This paper determines whether adopting the basket-peg rather than the floating regime is optimal for emerging market countries. Under the basket-peg regime, there is a trade-off between practical usefulness and welfare losses associated with capital movements across countries. We develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model for small open economies to derive a simple basket weight rule. Although this is suboptimal, we find it practical and easy to implement. With calibration using Singaporean and Thai data for 1997Q3-2006Q2 and comparison among cumulative losses associated with the policy instrument rules, we show that a commitment to the basket weight rule is superior to other instrument rules under the floating regime for small, open emerging market countries like Singapore and Thailand.