The evolution of private saving and its interaction with government fiscal policy play an important and complex role in the development of the national economy. To gain insight into this process, it is imperative that we improve our understanding of the savings behaviour of individual households and of the ways in which they aggregate over the entire population to produce national saving. Italy provides an ideal laboratory in which to assess the impact of government and private transfer, imperfections in the capital markets, productivity growth and shifting demographic patterns on the saving behavior of individual households and on their aggregation into total private saving. The book draws on the Italian experience and data, and offers findings on many aspects of the process of saving determination.

The evolution of private saving and its interaction with government fiscal policy play an important and complex role in the development of the national economy. To gain insight into this process, it is imperative that we improve our understanding of the savings behaviour of individual households and of the ways in which they aggregate over the entire population to produce national saving. Italy provides an ideal laboratory in which to assess the impact of government and private transfer, imperfections in the capital markets, productivity growth and shifting demographic patterns on the saving behavior of individual households and on their aggregation into total private saving. The book draws on the Italian experience and data, and offers findings on many aspects of the process of saving determination.

The monetary side of domestic and international economic policy has generated increasingly intense debate and concern within and among the major industrial countries over the last several years. Recently, the Bank of Japan's Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies brought together leading academics and prominent economists of central banks and international organizations to analyze and discuss the key problems and issues of monetary policy of developed countries. Collected in this volume are their original contributions: eight essays that cover monetary policy in an uncertain world, domestic and international aspects of monetary policy, and policies to overcome stagflation. In particular, they recognize and provide a lively forum for the different views of academic and central bank economists.The essays are "Monetarism in Rhetoric and in Practice," by Milton Friedman; "Monetary Policy in an Uncertain World," by James Tobin; "The Conduct of Domestic Monetary Policy," by Robert Gorden; "Monetary Policy in Postwar Japan," by K. Hamada and F. Hayashi; "Monetary Policy in the Large Open Economy," by Michael Darby; "Alternative Approaches to Exchange-Rate Determination and Some Implications of the Structural Balance-of-Payments Approach for International Macroeconomic Interdependence," by Akihiro Amano; "'Reaganomics' and Credibility," by Thomas Sargent; and "Coordination of Monetary and Fiscal Policies," by Albert Ando.

A set of related papers dealing with the meaning of causality in simulataneous dynamic equation systems. Investigation of the systems which only approximately satisfy the conditions enabling the definition of causality, leads to a set of limiting theorems concerning the dynamic behavior of such systems over time, and estimation procedures for the parameters of such systems. Implications of these theorems for some well-known propositions in economics and other social sciences are considered.