Shift In Japan Research Articles

Japan's taxing bureaucrats: fiscal sociology and the property-tax revolt

This paper examines Japan's 1990s property-tax revolt using Schumpeter's fiscal sociology, or what in contemporary terms could be referred to as an historical institutionalist perspective on fiscal politics.We argue that the revolt was rooted in the wartime fiscal system, whose legacy includes bureaucratic turf wars over taxes on income, consumption and assets. In recent years, this conflict over access to revenues has been aggravated by a fiscal crisis and major shifts in Japan's national and subnational tax systems. In our view, the activism of Japan's fiscal bureaucrats tends to be dismissed by rational choice institutionalism, especially its principal-agent variant. By contrast, we show that bureaucratic agencies are important, autonomous actors in Japanese fiscal politics, and argue that identifying and explaining their organizational agendas requires more eclectic methods. The public finances are one of the best starting points for an investigation of society, especially though not exclusively of its political life. The full fruitfulness of this approach is seen particularly at those turning points, or better epochs, during which existing forms begin to die off and to change into something new, and which always involve a crisis of the old fiscal methods. Joseph Schumpeter'The Crisis of the Tax State' (1918)

Japan as Top Donor: The Challenge of Implementing Software Aid Policy

JAPANESE OFFICIAL DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE (ODA) is undergoing a major J transformation in the post-cold war era. Foreign is no longer an instrument of bipolar international competition. However, despite expectations of a peace dividend, total flows have not increased. On the contrary, the total supply of foreign spent by the twenty-one member states of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) stagnated at about $60 billion per year from 1992 to 1994.1 Recession and increasing United Nations obligations for peacekeeping partly account for this, preventing further growth in ODA expenditures. Amidst these trends, Japan has become the top ODA donor country (see figure 1). As top donor, Japan faces both new opportunities and challenges in this uncertain international environment. A vacuum left by the withdrawal of other major donors offersJapan the opportunity to assume a leadership role in defining a new paradigm for development assistance. The recent promotion of aid can be seen as a strategic shift in Japan's ODA. Software is defined as assistance for human resource development and institutional building 2 in economic and social development. It involves providing information and knowledge, often in forms such as training and policy advice, as opposed to hardware aid, involving provision of physical construction and equipment. This new policy direction to promote software can be seen as an instrument forJapan to express a vision of development assistance in the post-cold war era to the international community.

A Reexamination of Japan's Aggregate Import Demand Function: An Application of The Engle and Granger Two-Step Procedure

This paper reexamines the import demand function of Japan. In addition to using the relatively new procedures of cointegration and error-correction modeling, the role of effective exchange rate on Japan's import demand is considered. The empirical results suggest that the error-correction model performs very well. The estimates confirm that the omission of effective exchange rate, misspecification of the adjust- ment mechanism, and the use of the price-ratio format have yielded statistically insignificant or implausible results. The results suggest also that the recent apprecia- tion of the yen has caused a structural shift in Japan's import demand behavior. [C13]

Japan's shift in management technology: from quality control to strategic information systems

This article describes the strategic information system (SIS) mode of management of companies and other organizations in Japan. The authors describe the shift from quality control (QC) based management to SIS. They explain the environmental changes which led to the shift to SIS, and the differences between the two management systems. Some findings from a survey of Japanese executives are discussed. The article concludes by suggesting that skills developed by the Japanese for the QC mode are transferrable to the SIS mode, thereby facilitating the successful implementation of the SIS management mode in Japanese companies.

Japan and its Mainland Neighbours: An End to Equidistance?

T | 1HE speed with which Japan has normalised its relations with the People's Republic of China and the rapid expansion of Soviet-Japanese economic relations, coming in the wake of the troubles between Japan and the United States in the early 1970s, raise a series of questions as to whether a basic shift in Japan's foreign policy is occurring. Is Japan moving away from close ties with the United States and towards closer links with its giant mainland neighbours, the Soviet Union and China? If so, might geographic and cultural proximity lead Japan to move much closer to Peking than to Moscow, and how would Soviet leaders react to such a development? To what extent have recent developments been the result of Japanese initiatives, and to what extent the result of ad hoc Japanese responses to the moves of other powers? The answers to these questions, and thus the resulting pattern of relations between Tokyo, Peking and Moscow, will depend upon the interaction of four major factors. The first is the general trend in the political situation in East Asia, and especially the evolution of Soviet and Chinese policies towards the major issues and powers involved. More particularly, what will be the basic character of Chinese and Soviet policies towards Japan? Will one or both countries attempt to expand their influence in Japan by seeking areas of co-operation and accommodation with Tokyo, or will they try to put pressure on it, or threaten it, to achieve their aims? They probably will do some of each, but the particular combination of means employed by each communist capital, and how the tactics of one compare with those of the other, will have much to do with the Japanese response. A second factor influencing Japanese foreign policy will be the country's economic problems. The era in which Japan could simultaneously depend upon cheap raw materials and expanding markets for industrial exports has at least temporarily ended. The advent of the oil crisis, which occurred when Japan was already undergoing increasing inflationary pressures, forced the government to take such severe deflationary measures as to bring about in 1974 the first absolute decline in GNP for over two decades. Although Japan gradually brought the rate of inflation down from over 20 per cent. in 1974 to about 10 per cent. in 1975, the economy remains stagnant. In the past Japan