Rock Mechanics and Engineering Geology in Volcanic Fields includes keynote lectures and papers from the 5th International Workshop on Rock Mechanics and Engineering Geology in Volcanic Fields (RMEGV2021, Fukuoka, Japan, 9-10 September 2021). This book deals with challenging studies related to solving engineering issues around volcanic fields, including: Volcanic geology, disasters and their mitigation Resources and energy in volcanic fields Mechanical behavior of volcanic rocks and soils Groundwater and environmental problems in volcanic fields Geotechnical engineering in volcanic fields Rock Mechanics and Engineering Geology in Volcanic Fields is of great interest to civil engineers and engineering geologists working in the areas of rock and soil mechanics, geotechnical engineering, geothermal energy, engineering geology, and environmental science.

Rock Mechanics and Engineering Geology in Volcanic Fields includes keynote lectures and papers from the 5th International Workshop on Rock Mechanics and Engineering Geology in Volcanic Fields (RMEGV2021, Fukuoka, Japan, 9-10 September 2021). This book deals with challenging studies related to solving engineering issues around volcanic fields, including: Volcanic geology, disasters and their mitigation Resources and energy in volcanic fields Mechanical behavior of volcanic rocks and soils Groundwater and environmental problems in volcanic fields Geotechnical engineering in volcanic fields Rock Mechanics and Engineering Geology in Volcanic Fields is of great interest to civil engineers and engineering geologists working in the areas of rock and soil mechanics, geotechnical engineering, geothermal energy, engineering geology, and environmental science.

The failure of the dollar peg to prevent the Asian currency crisis of 1997 to 1998 has highlighted the importance of the exchange rate regime in Asia and provoked much discussion as to what the alternatives are in terms of exchange rate systems.
Bringing together extensive research on Asian basket currencies in one volume, this new text discusses whether a currency basket system is the answer, striking a balance between the theoretical and empirical. With strong policy implications for East Asia, the impressive team of contributors argue that for countries that have close economic relationships with several currency areas, it is well worth considering a currency basket system. The book also pursues the important idea of coordination failure, whereby if each individual country tries to adopt an optimal exchange rate given other neighbouring countries' policies, they may collectively fail to reach a region's optimal exchange rate regime.
A Basket Currency for Asia is a topical and significant text that will appeal to students and scholars of international finance and Asian economics.

The failure of the dollar peg to prevent the Asian currency crisis of 1997 to 1998 has highlighted the importance of the exchange rate regime in Asia and provoked much discussion as to what the alternatives are in terms of exchange rate systems.
Bringing together extensive research on Asian basket currencies in one volume, this new text discusses whether a currency basket system is the answer, striking a balance between the theoretical and empirical. With strong policy implications for East Asia, the impressive team of contributors argue that for countries that have close economic relationships with several currency areas, it is well worth considering a currency basket system. The book also pursues the important idea of coordination failure, whereby if each individual country tries to adopt an optimal exchange rate given other neighboring countries' policies, they may collectively fail to reach a region's optimal exchange rate regime.
"A Basket Currency for Asia" is a topical and significant text that will appeal to students and scholars of international finance and Asian economics.

For more than three decades, the United States has conducted a unique Japan-specific economic policy. This policy was motivated by Japan's economic size and dynamism, fears that a unique "Japanese model of capitalism" enabled it to compete unfairly and threaten American prosperity during a period of prolonged US economic difficulties, and that the United States had unique capabilities to induce policy change in Japan due to its provision of security guarantees. No More Bashing argues that these assessments are mistaken and that the United States should abandon its Japan-specific policy. Japan's declining relative importance in the world economy, the waning distinctiveness of its economic institutions, the failure of most recent US initiatives toward Japan, and the emergence of strengthened international institutions such as the World Trade Organization, all underscore the advisability of formulating new approaches to bilateral relations rooted more firmly in multilateral institutions. This volume analyzes the outlook for the Japanese and US economies; their trade and financial relationships, including their trade negotiations over the past decade; the implications of new regional developments, most notably the rise of China and proposals for East Asian economic cooperation; and the roles of the United States and Japan in the provision of international public goods such as development assistance, environmental protection, and international security. It emphasizes that their trade agenda is increasingly moving beyond traditional border impediments toward the more politically sensitive issues of internal regulation and deregulation, such as competition policy. The authors propose a series of new initiatives to address these challenges and strengthen the multilateral system.

The second edition of a comprehensive account of all the major aspects of the Japanese economy, substantially updated and expanded. This textbook offers a comprehensive, rigorous but accessible account of all the major aspects of the Japanese economy, grounding its approach in mainstream economics. The second edition has been extensively revised and substantially updated, with new material that covers Japan's period of economic stagnation between 1991 and 2010. The first edition, published in 1992, focused on Japan as a success story of catch-up economic development; this edition reflects the lessons learned from Japan's Lost Two Decades. After presenting the historical background, the book begins with macroeconomics, studying growth and business cycles. It then covers essential policy issues, with new material that takes into account the Japanese banking crisis of 1997-1998 and the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, discussing financial regulation, monetary policy, and fiscal policy. It goes on to examine saving, demography, and social security in light of Japan's ongoing demographic transition; industrial organization; labor markets; international trade and international finance; and the Japan-U.S. relationship. A new chapter offers a detailed analysis of the Lost Two Decades, synthesizing and applying concepts discussed in previous chapters and offering insights into such issues as successful catch-up growth, demographic shifts, and credit booms and busts.

This book analyzes how the bank-dominated financial system-a key element of the oft-heralded "Japanese economic model"-broke down in the 1990s and spawned sweeping reforms. Japan's financial institutions and policy underwent remarkable change in the past decade. The country began the 1990s with a heavily regulated financial system managed by an unchallenged Ministry of Finance and ended the decade with a Big Bang financial market reform, a complete restructuring of its regulatory financial institutions, and an independent central bank. These reforms have taken place amid recession and rising unemployment, collapsing asset prices, a looming banking crisis, and the lowest interest rates in the industrial world. This book analyzes how the bank-dominated financial system-a key element of the oft-heralded "Japanese economic model"-broke down in the 1990s and spawned sweeping reforms. It documents the sources of the Japanese economic stagnation of the 1990s, the causes of the financial crisis, the slow and initially limited policy response to banking problems, and the reform program that followed. It also evaluates the new financial structure and reforms at the Bank of Japan in light of the challenges facing the Japanese economy. These challenges range from conducting monetary policy in a zero-interest rate environment characterized by a "liquidity trap" to managing consolidation in the Japanese banking sector against the backdrop of increasing international competition.

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.

Fluctuations of commodity prices, most notably of oil, capture considerable attention and have been tied to important economic effects, such as inflation and low rates of economic growth. "Commodity Prices and Markets" advances our understanding of the consequences of these fluctuations, providing both general analysis and a particular focus on the countries of the Pacific Rim. The volume addresses three distinct subjects: the difficulties in forecasting commodity prices, the effects of exogenous commodity price shocks on the domestic economy, and the relationship between price shocks and monetary policy. Accurately forecasting commodity prices is difficult but of great importance to businesses and governments, and this volume will be invaluable to professionals and policymakers interested in the field.

The volume of capital flows between industrial and developing countries has grown dramatically in the past decade and has become a major issue in a world that is increasingly globalized. In this book, Takatoshi Ito and Anne O. Krueger, two leading experts on this topic, have assembled a group of scholars who address different types of capital flows-bank lending, bonds, direct foreign investment-and the implications they hold for economic performance. By concentrating on macroeconomic issues concerning the flow of private capital to and from the East Asian economies during the currency crises of 1997, the commentary aims to help policy makers avoid such crises in the future. The analyses undertaken here deal with a variety of questions, focusing especially on the "economic fundamentals" of the affected economies and on the irrational "herd behavior" of investors. With its particular focus on the Asian financial crises, this work presents a new model in thinking about the role of private capital flows for policy makers everywhere.

This capstone volume to the Brookings project on Integrating National Economies--a pathbreaking series of books on the future of economic integration--presents a new vision to guide international policy. This book offers a thought-provoking and positive outlook on how national economies should be further integrated as we prepare to meet the challenge of creating a peaceful yet dynamic future for the global community in the next millennium.

This volume explores the macroeconomic experience of East Asia in the 1980s and the impact of the region's growth on the rest of the world. The authors examine variables such as current account surpluses and deficits, as well as the ways in which exchange rate fluctuations in today's global economy affect the economies of countries not only in the same region but across the globe. These fourteen papers are organized around four themes: the overall determinants of growth and trading relations in the region; monetary policies in relation to capital controls and capital accounts; the impact of exchange rates on industrial structure; and the potential for greater regional integration. The contributors cover topics such as interactions among exchange rate movements, trade balances, and capital flows in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, and the impact of exchange rates on industrial structure, inventories, and prices of both domestic and exported goods. One set of papers, examining the role of government monetary policy, reveals that when oil prices declined in Taiwan and the government loosened its monetary policy, growth increased without inflation. Another set of papers, focusing on the extent of regional integration in East Asia, finds that most of these nations' currencies are more closely tied to the dollar than to the yen. Macroeconomic Linkage offers a careful study of economic developments in East Asia that will be especially valuable to economists interested in international trade and exchange rates and to regional experts who focus on East Asia.

The rapid emergence of East Asia as an important geopolitical-economic entity has been one of the most visible and striking changes in the international economy in recent years. With that emergence has come an increased need for understanding the problems of interdependence. As a step toward meeting this need, the National Bureau of Economic Research joined with the Korea Development Institute to sponsor this volume, which focuses on the complexities of tax reform in a global economy. Experts from Taiwan, Korea, the Philippines, Japan, and Thailand, as well as the United States, Canada, and Israel examine the major tax programs of the 1980s and their domestic and international economic effects. The authors provide overviews, country studies, and analyses of the effect of taxes on specific economic behavior, including saving and economic growth. The overviews include an examination of the link between taxes and domestic capital formation in open economies, and a look at the similarities and differences in the tax structure of eight East Asian countries. Other papers address broad issues related to tax policy and economic performance. Contributors evaluate the effects of changing the marginal tax rate on income from capital; analyze the relation between Korea's tax structure and its rate of economic growth; study the impact of tax reform and the aging Japanese population on savings; compare and contrast the gift and estate tax systems of the United States and Japan; and examine whether the tax systems of Korea and Taiwan, particularly the taxation of foreign capital, distort resource allocation. Studies of the political and economic interactions that underlie tax reform in the UnitedStates, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan reveal that in au of these countries domestic political considerations were far more important than international issues when deciding on tax reforms. Economists, policymakers, and members of the business community will benefit from these studies.

The increased mobility and volume of international capital flows is a striking trend in international finance. While countries worldwide have engaged in financial deregulation, nowhere is this pattern more pronounced than in East Asia, where it has affected in unanticipated ways the behavior of exchange rates, interest rates, and capital flows. In these thirteen essays, American and Asian scholars analyze the effects of financial deregulation and integration on East Asian markets. Topics covered include the impact of financial liberalization in Japan, Korea, and Singapore, macroeconomic policy implications for financial management of export-led growth in Korea and Taiwan, the roles of the United States and Japan in trading with Asian countries, and the effects of foreign direct investment in China. Demonstrating the complexity of financial deregulation and the challenges it poses for policy makers, this volume provides an excellent picture of the overall status of East Asian financial markets for scholars in international finance and Asian economic development.