Empirical Analysis of Economic Institutions

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This project attempts to answer the following two questions. First, why has Japan's postwar economic institutions been performing poorly, and second, how to design a system that would lead the country back to its previous high growth path? The project went through a major re-organization in fiscal year 2003. The two newly articulated research objectives are: 1. find out why Japan's growth slowed down in the 1990s; 2. how to modify institutions to restore growth. To meet these objectives, the project set three stages of investigation. A) find out what happened to TFP (total factor productivity) at the macro and industry levels, B) if TFP fell, identify the changes in institutions that might have caused it, and C) design economic institutions to deal with those changes. There are seven research groups with their own mandates. See their abstracts of research for the accomplishments. This group, which is responsible for coordinating the research activities of the seven groups, organized meetings by group heads, research meetings and conferences attended by group members and other academics and also a public forum to disseminate research outcomes. The group also worked with a publishing company to produce a collection of books containing mostly empirical studies on the project's research objectives.