This book examines how Japan should cope with fiscal challenges, as demands on the budget from an ageing society have necessitated the reigning in of public debt and the revamp of the pension and healthcare systems. It combines insights from academic research with the views of policymakers to distil key issues that need to inform public debate.

This volume is intended to provide a survey of thought about exchange-rate determination as it emerged in the decade of the 1970s. This survey differs from many, however, in that the field itself is in a state of rapid change. Understanding the changes and the reasons for them is therefore essential if the reader is to have a basis for understanding future advances in knowledge and the further evolution of the system. The survey is also intended to reach non-specialist professional economists whose balance-of-payments theory was learned before the 1970s, as well as to provide graduate students and advanced undergraduates with an up-to-date account of the field. In most respects, the theory of exchange-rate determination is based upon an analytical structure equivalent to that analyzing the determinants of the balance of payments under fixed exchange rates. The difference is that the shifts in excess demand for foreign exchange lead to quantity adjustments under fixed rates and price adjustment under flexible rates. Thus, attention turns first to exchange-rate, or balance-of-payments, determination. Thereafter formal analyses of differences and similarities between the functioning of the alternative systems are considered, reflecting the focus of the profession and the mainstream of research of this period.

The World Trade Organization was established in the 1990s, superseding the GATT and providing a stronger institutional foundation for international trading arrangement among countries. As an international organization it faces a number of challenges, including achieving agreement over trade in services, bringing in new members from the economies in transition and developing countries, making the strengthened dispute settlement mechanism effective, and bringing about an increasingly open multilateral trading system. This volume analyzes the challenges and opportunities confronting the WTO. Several chapters address the WTO's institutional capacity directly, through such issues as the way national policies may influence or constrain the WTO, the difficulties of achieving coherence with the World Bank and the IMF, and the resources available to the WTO's secretariat in relation to the tasks it faces. Other papers in this volume consider more contemporary policy issues facing the WTO, including how to bring services trade into an open multilateral framework, how dispute settlement mechanisms can be improved, and how other concerns, such as labour standards and environmental issues may be addressed. Two papers focus on the WTO's relationship to developing countries and countries in transition, and an introductory chapter provides an overview of the WTO's operation. The text presumes no technical background in economics.

International trade and trade policy have become increasingly important and complex in recent years. In this comprehensive introduction to the key aspects of international trade policy, noted authority Anne O. Krueger explains what has happened and why these issues are so difficult. With evidence-based analysis and an even-handed approach, International Trade: What Everyone Needs to Know lays the foundation to understand what trade does and does not do. Focusing on the importance of trade in both goods and services, Krueger explores the effects of various trade policies step-by-step and demonstrates why economists generally support free trade. Krueger considers the historical experience, highlighting how technological changes and reduction of trade barriers helped transform the world economy. Tariffs, antidumping and countervailing duties, government procurement policies, preferential trading arrangements, trade with developing countries and emerging markets, and the World Trade Organization are examined. Krueger tackles the fundamental questions surrounding trade including: What are the benefits and costs? What are trade deficits and do they matter? Why do some people favor protectionism and barriers to trade? How does trade policy affect workers? Written in question-and-answer format, this non-technical introduction to the policies of international trade provides an indispensable guide to one of the most crucial elements of the global economy.

International trade and trade policy have become increasingly important and complex in recent years. In this comprehensive introduction to the key aspects of international trade policy, noted authority Anne O. Krueger explains what has happened and why these issues are so difficult. With evidence-based analysis and an even-handed approach, International Trade: What Everyone Needs to Know lays the foundation to understand what trade does and does not do. Focusing on the importance of trade in both goods and services, Krueger explores the effects of various trade policies step-by-step and demonstrates why economists generally support free trade. Krueger considers the historical experience, highlighting how technological changes and reduction of trade barriers helped transform the world economy. Tariffs, antidumping and countervailing duties, government procurement policies, preferential trading arrangements, trade with developing countries and emerging markets, and the World Trade Organization are examined. Krueger tackles the fundamental questions surrounding trade including: What are the benefits and costs? What are trade deficits and do they matter? Why do some people favor protectionism and barriers to trade? How does trade policy affect workers? Written in question-and-answer format, this non-technical introduction to the policies of international trade provides an indispensable guide to one of the most crucial elements of the global economy.

A traditionally conservative country in financial matters, India enacted a series of reforms in response to its balance of payments crisis in the early 1990s. But since then only halting progress has been made, raising concerns about India's rising fiscal deficit, inefficiencies in its financial system, and its still relatively closed economy. This book analyzes some of the complex issues currently facing the Indian economy. Looking at India in the international economy, the first section examines reforms of policies toward trade and capital inflows, including issues in exchange rate policy and international business prospects. The second section addresses banking and financial markets, tracking the reforms to date and establishing the need for upgraded technology. The final section compares India's fiscal performance with that of other developing countries, highlighting worrying trends, and presents concrete policy recommendations to advance Indian reforms.

Uncovering the distinction between the rhetoric and the reality of US trade policy, this study examines growing US protectionism and Washington's aggressive use of bilateral trade tactics. In order to avoid a world trade war, renewed commitment to open multilateral trade is needed.

The author considers the implications of deeper integration in the international economy for developing countries. She traces the reasons for the developing countries' reversals of earlier policies and demonstrates the importance of the open trading system for them.

Anne O. Krueger is professor of economics at Stanford University

"Anne O. Krueger has assembled and deftly summarized an excellent set of papers on the major issues in economic reform in developing countries at the turn of the century."--Stanley Fischer, International Monetary Fund
The papers and commentary collected in this volume discuss vital contemporary thinking on economic policy reform--in particular, the difficulties that leave so much of the world mired in poverty. Distinguished contributors address issues ranging from education and privatization to exchange rates and telecommunications reform, providing an excellent overview of the current situation and the possible paths into the future.

In recent years the tremendous growth of the service sector--including international trade in services--has outstripped that of manufacturing in many industrialized nations. As the importance of services has grown, economists have begun to focus on policy issues raised by them and have tried to understand what, if any, differences there are between production and delivery of goods and services.
This volume is the first book-length attempt to analyze trade in services in the Asia-Pacific region. Contributors provide overviews of basic issues involved in studying the service sector; investigate the impact of increasing trade in services on the economies of Taiwan, Korea, and Hong Kong; present detailed analyses of specific service sectors (telecommunications, financial services, international tourism, and accounting); and extend our understanding of trade in services beyond the usual concept (measured in balance of payment statistics) to include indirect services and services undertaken abroad by subsidiaries and affiliates.

This first book of a three-volume study examines the way trade policies in developing countries affect the level and composition of employment. There is special emphasis on the effects of import substitution policies that attempt to make a country self-sufficient by producing local substitutes for imports, as compared with policies that further the expansion of imports.
Ten countries are studied: Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Indonesia, the Ivory Coast, Pakistan, South Korea, Thailand, Tunisia, and Uruguay. The contributors to the volume analyze the link between trade strategies and employment within a common framework, and the analyses of trade policy include the level and structure of protection, the relation of trade policy to labor demand, the labor intensiveness of trade, and the extent of distortions in factor markets and their effects on trade.

Over the last twenty-five years, there has been an acceleration in the move from government regulation towards privatization. "Governance, Regulation, and Privatization in the Asia-Pacific Region" is the first thoroughgoing account of the relative success of the different approaches to privatization as undertaken in Korea, China, Australia, and Japan.
In most contexts, privatization is expected to yield greater efficiency and cost effectiveness while avoiding the corruption and bloated budgets of government regulation or monopoly control. But broad-scale privatization, if ill designed, has also yielded its share of difficulties in East Asia. Privatization sometimes has created a vacuum in corporate governance for some of the region's most important industries and in some cases merely reinstated the monopoly-like configurations. The papers presented in this book discuss the experiences of privatization in several industries, including railroad and telecom, corporate governance problems, accounting issues, and challenges for the future in East Asian countries.
The first section is theoretical in nature and proposes boundaries among government protection, market freedom, and shareholder expectations. The second part is constituted by country case studies, beginning with an analysis of both the Korean financial crisis that followed its 1997 law to privatize large, public sector corporations and the new ways Korean corporations finance themselves. Following is an evaluation of China's approach to privatization, with an in-depth look at the financial transitions of companies slated for initial public offering.
Providing provocative examples of the methods of privatization in theAsia-Pacific region specifically, these papers will be of huge import to any economist or policymaker interested in transposing those successes for their own region.

India is the second most populous country in the world. It is also one of the poorest: from the 1940s to 1980, India's per capita income grew at an average annual rate of only 2 percent. Expansionist economic reforms during the 1980s boosted growth, but also resulted in high inflation and a balance of payments crisis. As a consequence, 1991 saw the announcement of sweeping new changes in economic policy.
This volume evaluates the effects of those changes and identifies areas of the Indian economy still in urgent need of reform. After an overview of Indian economic policies and development since independence, papers focus on the country's fiscal situation, the environment for private economic activity, education, the reservation of certain activities for small-scale industry, and determinants of differentials in rates of growth across the different Indian states. Contributors include respected academic specialists on both India and policy reform, high-level Indian administrators, and present and past policymakers.
As former Secretary of State George P. Schulz writes in his introduction, "The entire world economy will benefit from an open, successful Indian economy"-not least the quarter of Indians who live in poverty, and the nation's burgeoning middle class. This volume offers not only an examination of the progress that has been made, but also a sense of the problems still to be confronted, with much insight into how to address them.

The World Trade Organization was established in the 1990s, superseding the GATT and providing a stronger institutional foundation for international trading arrangement among countries. As an international organization it faces a number of challenges, including achieving agreement over trade in services, bringing in new members from the economies in transition and developing countries, making the strengthened dispute settlement mechanism effective, and bringing about an increasingly open multilateral trading system. This volume analyzes the challenges and opportunities confronting the WTO. Several chapters address the WTO's institutional capacity directly, through such issues as the way national policies may influence or constrain the WTO, the difficulties of achieving coherence with the World Bank and the IMF, and the resources available to the WTO's secretariat in relation to the tasks it faces. Other papers in this volume consider more contemporary policy issues facing the WTO, including how to bring services trade into an open multilateral framework, how dispute settlement mechanisms can be improved, and how other concerns, such as labour standards and environmental issues may be addressed. Two papers focus on the WTO's relationship to developing countries and countries in transition, and an introductory chapter provides an overview of the WTO's operation. The text presumes no technical background in economics.

During the first three decades following the Second World War, an increasingly open international trading system contributed to unprecedented economic growth throughout the world. But in recent years, that openness has been threatened by increased protectionism, regional trading arrangements - Europe 1992 and the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement - and setbacks in negotiations on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. In Trade and Protectionism, American and East Asian scholars consider the dangers of this trend for East Asian countries in particular and the world economy in general. The first two papers in the volume look at the context in which East Asian trading relations with the United States take place. The papers focus on the role of GATT, the importance of an open multilateral trading system, and the current threats to it. An analysis of the United States' regional trading arrangements is also included. The second set of papers addresses sensitive sectoral issues that have led to frictions in Japanese-American semiconductor trade and agricultural protection among Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong. In the third group of studies, the authors examine U.S.-Japanese trade issues, the impact of U.S.-administered protection on Korean exports, and the openness of the Japanese market to exports from other Asian countries. Next, aspects of international economic relations among Asian countries are considered. Two studies explore foreign direct investment relations between Japan and other Asian countries, and the relationship between Japanese foreign direct investment and trade flows among Asian countries. The final five papers analyze how political-economic interaction affects levels ofprotection, focusing on the political economy of protection in Korea and Taiwan. This is the second volume in the series to come from the National Bureau of Economic Research-East Asia Seminar on Economics. The first volume, The Political Economy of Tax Reform, addresses tax reform in the global economy.

The contributors to this volume analyze the growth experiences of Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan in light of the recently developed endogenous growth theory to provide an understanding of the economic boom in East Asia. The theory explored in this volume attributes the phenomenal economic success of these countries to, among other factors, the role of an outward orientation - a focus on exporting rather than on protecting home markets. In addition, the importance of exchange rate behavior, of the supportive role of government policy, and of the accumulation and promotion of physical and human capital are explored in detail. This collection also makes significant contributions to recent work examining the extent to which growth in each country became self-sustaining once it began. This fourth volume in the NBER-East Asia Seminar on Economics series demonstrates the relevance of endogenous growth theory for studying this important region and will be invaluable for economists and for those interested in East Asian affairs.

Exploring the political and economic determinants of trade protection, this study provides a wealth of information on key American industries to document the process of seeking and conferring protection. In eight parallel analytical histories of the automobile, steel, semiconductor, lumber, wheat, and textile and apparel industries, the contributors demonstrate that trade barriers rarely have unequivocal benefits and may indeed be counterproductive in the long run. They also find that the political and administrative criteria for awarding protection do not take into account the interests of final consumers, other American industries, or foreign countries. Political influence and a well-organized lobby, they show, are major sources of protection. Also included is a cross-section study of the determinants of administered protection that sheds light on the overall political economy of protection. A concluding essay integrates these findings and suggests that current protection practices fail to consider adequately economic efficiency, the public good, and a wide range of indirect negative economic effects. This volume will be of interest to scholars in economics, business, and public policy who are concerned with trade issues.