Month: September 2013

I came across an article in the New York Times titled, “Tax Increase Proposal Raises Fear of Slowdown in Japan”. In this article, the author describes the two opposing viewpoints of an increase from 5% to 8% sales tax that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is planning to implement in order to begin working towards diminishing Japan’s massive national debt. The tax is to be distributed evenly throughout all goods and services, in an effort to minimize changes to the recently thriving Japanese economy. Still, economists are worried that the drastic increase in sales tax is too much too soon, and that it will cause Japan to backslide into “the deflationary morass that has dogged it for 15 years” (Tabuchi).

…消費税と研究開発…

Ronald Coase passed away at age 102. While I never met him, my own research at Yale (and Hitotsubashi University and University of Tokyo) was influenced by his thinking about why firms exist and where their boundaries lie. That ultimately resulted in a book Competitive Ties (Columbia University Press, 1991) on automotive parts suppliers in Japan and how assemblers structured transactions.