Political Economy Quarterly
Online ISSN : 2189-7719
Print ISSN : 1882-5184
ISSN-L : 1882-5184
Volume 51, Issue 4
Displaying 1-18 of 18 articles from this issue
  • Article type: Cover
    2015 Volume 51 Issue 4 Pages Cover1-
    Published: January 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: April 25, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
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  • Yuji HARADA
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 51 Issue 4 Pages 3-5
    Published: January 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: April 25, 2017
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  • Hiroaki SASAKI
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 51 Issue 4 Pages 6-17
    Published: January 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: April 25, 2017
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    The purpose of this study is to explain and comment on some theoretical studies that investigate the effect of the tendency toward services on economic growth. To begin with, from the theoretical analysis that assumes full employment, we can say as follows. If the productivity growth rate of manufacturing is higher than that of services, and if the preference of consumers meets some conditions, then the employment share of services increases. Moreover, according as the employment share of services increases, the aggregate productivity growth rate of the economy decreases and converges to the productivity growth rate of services. Therefore, given the tendency toward services, if we want to increase the aggregate productivity growth rate of the economy, we need to increase the productivity growth rate of services. In contrast, there are few theoretical studies that investigate the relationship between the tendency toward services and unemployment. Accordingly, such studies should be done more actively. Moreover, there are few theoretical studies that investigate the effect of the tendency toward services on economic growth under the open-economy setting. In the models that are explained in the present paper, services are treated as non-tradable. However, nowadays, services as tradable increase their presence, and hence, we need to build models that consider such point. In addition, there are few open-economy models that consider unemployment. Therefore, we need to build models that consider both services as tradable and unemployment.
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  • Hiroyasu UEMURA, Shinji TAHARA
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 51 Issue 4 Pages 18-33
    Published: January 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: April 25, 2017
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    One of the most important structural changes in advanced countries is a relative decline in output and employment of the manufacturing industry, which is often called "de-industrialization". This paper makes clear the meaning of "de-industrialization", based on a survey of existing researches, and shows a theoretical framework of "de-industrialization" with a macroeconomic model which takes account of industrial structural changes. Furthermore, this paper conducts a comparative analysis of de-industrialization in advances countries. In this paper, the study is developed from following perspectives. First, de-industrialization is analyzed not only as a general trend of the expanding service economy but also as structural changes in capital accumulation and the transformation of the growth regime. Second, the analysis of "growth regime" in the regulation theory focusing on interactions between output growth and productivity growth is developed by taking account of industrial structural changes. Third, the theory of de-industrialization is formalized in Input-Output Analysis, and is applied to an empirical study with a multi-sector framework. Fourth, the structural change and diversity of de-industrialization are analyzed in advanced countries such as UK, Germany, Italy and Japan by utilizing World Input-Output Database (WIOD). De-industrialization has four different forms. The first is "positive de-industrialization", which is caused by productivity differentials between the manufacturing industry and the service industry. The second is "negative de-industrialization", which is accompanied by a decline in the output of the manufacturing industry. The third is "de-industrialization by manufacturing-service linkages", which is characterized by the expansion of business-elated services. The fourth is "de-industrialization by a long-term shift in demand from the manufacturing to the services", which may occur for particular services. UK, Germany, Italy and Japan show different patterns of de-industrialization for the period, 1995-2009. In UK, "financial services" and "business-related services" grew with high productivity growth in a boom period, while the "export core manufacturing" industry often shows negative growth rates, causing "negative de-industrialization". In Germany and Japan, the "export core manufacturing" industry grew strongly with high productivity growth, causing "positive de-industrialization", and the manufacturing-service linkages are remarkably tight. In Italy, the "export core manufacturing" industry and "the other manufacturing" industry often show a negative growth rate with low productivity growth, so this causes a mild de-industrialization. De-industrialization with the expanding service economy may bring about more dualistic structures in the economy, depending on labor market segmentation and policy orientation in the economy. Therefore, faced with different patterns of de-industrialization in each economy, it is a very important research agenda how we can realize a vital economy with less inequality.
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  • Hiroyuki UNI
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 51 Issue 4 Pages 34-45
    Published: January 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: April 25, 2017
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    Since 1980, employment structure by industry and occupation in developed countries has changed greatly. The most significant change is a rise of administrative and professional occupation in the tertiary industry and a fall of other occupations (called "general occupation", hereafter) in the secondary industry. These are structural changes in a sense of irreversible and long term changes. In these two changes, the former has attracted attention as "shift towards service industry" and "deindustrialization", on which many studies have been made. On the other hand, studies of the latter change, which can be called "shift towards administrative and professional occupation", are less especially in the field of economic theory. In Section I of this paper, changes of employment structure in the recent 30 years in developed countries are analyzed quantitatively. According to the most recent data, the employment of general occupation in the secondary industry was reduced to a little over 10% in the total employment. On the other hand, the employment of administrative and professional occupation in the tertiary industry has risen up to mid-30%. It is necessary to clarify reasons and mechanisms of such structural changes. Section II explains two mechanisms that results in structural change of employment by industry; "inter-industry Baumol effect" and "indirect employment effect". The former means that, if the real output growth rate of the secondary industry and that of the tertiary industry are nearly equal, and if the labor productivity growth rate of the secondary industry is larger than that of the tertiary industry, the ratio of the secondary industry to the total employment would decrease, and the ratio of the tertiary industry would increase. Section III explains two mechanisms that results in structural change of employment by occupation; "inter-occupation Baumol effect" and "overseas relocation effect". The former means that, if the growth rate of the quantity of the administrative and professional work and that of the general work are nearly equal, and if the labor productivity growth rate of the latter work is larger than that of the former work, the ratio of the general occupation to the total employment would decrease, and the ratio of the administrative and professional occupation would increase. According to the empirical analysis of Section II and Section III, there are the following two tendencies. Inter-industry Baumol effect tends to act not only in the general occupation, but also in the administrative and professional occupation. Inter-occupation Baumol effect tend to act not only in the secondary industry but also in the tertiary industry. When linking these two trends, the two structural changes referred in the biginning are easily explained. Therefore, the structural change of employment in developed countries in recent 30 years can be understood as a result of these two Baumol effects. Finally, Section IV mentions problems in economic theory in order to analyze employment structure in the contemporary capitalism. Although Marx, in Kapital, defined administrative work as supervision labor, and professional work as complex labor, he abstracted them substantially in the analysis of value formation. As, in the mid-19th century, the administrative and professional occupation existed only in a small percentage, such theoretical abstraction is acceptable. However, in the present, as the ratio of the administrative and professional occupation has reached close to 40%, such abstraction is not tolerated. Braverman, in Labor and Monopoly Capital, overestimated the decomposition of the administrative and professional work by Taylorization. Consequently, he overlooked the rise of administrative and professional occupation. It is necessary to explicitly incorporate the economic role and function

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  • Masao YAMAGUCHI
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 51 Issue 4 Pages 46-57
    Published: January 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: April 25, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    A decline in the share of manufacturing employment is generally called de-industrialization(Rowthorn and Weils 1997), which is observed in many developed countries. In Japan, the workers in manufacturing industry decreased by 3.15 million, and the workers in service industries, such as retail, restaurant, services, and the unclassifiable, increased by 0.46 million, 0.42 million, 2.92 million and 0.57 million, respectively from 1992 to 2002. This paper analyzes how the income distribution in Japan has changed as the de-industrialization deepens using a micro-level dataset of Employment Status Survey from 1992 to 2002. It decomposes the factor for income distribution change into the industrial structure change(de-industrialization), workers'attributes change within industry, and the change in human capital accumulation using distribution regression model. The result shows that the industrial structure change increased the share of workers whose incomes were less than \2,500,000. The main cause of this result is the characteristics of the workers in service industries, which have relatively higher share of those workers such as part-time, female, age of less than 30, and short tenure than that of manufacturing. Industrial structure change also decreased the average yearly income by \44,000, and increased the Gini coefficient by 0.004 which accounted for 40% of overall change. The paper also analyzes the wage differential between manufacturing and service industries. After controlling for the workers'attributes of services industries, the average incomes of retail and restaurant are smaller \270,000 and \520,000, respectively, than that of manufacturing. Furthermore, wage-differentials between regular and non-regular employees become larger in this ten-year period regardless of controlling for the workers'attributes within and between industries. These findings imply that de-industrialization may likely trigger the workers'shift from middle and high income groups to low income group in the future. This potential problem needs to be taken into consideration and the appropriate policies should be designed accordingly.
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  • Makoto ITOH
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 51 Issue 4 Pages 58-69
    Published: January 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: April 25, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

    In this paper, historical and social significance of ideas and practices of local (or community) currencies are examined, starting from economic thoughts and theories of Silvio Gesell. (1)Gesell's major work Die naturliche Wirtschaftsordnung durch Freiland und Freigeld (1916) was highly appreciated by J. M. Keynes. It aims at socialism with human freedom by abolishing unearned income such as ground rent and interest. In order to abolish ground rent, nationalization of land is to be achieved through offering certain amounts of state bond to private owners of land. The resultant payment of rent to the state is to be redistributed to mothers in proportion to their number of children (just like a sort of basic income). Whereas the idea to nationalize land does not seem particularly unique, Gesell's thoughts and theories of money and interest are quite original. In his view, traditional money has an advantage over all other commodity products physically not to decay or rust. Therefore money can easily be withdrawn from a market without loss, while other commodities are enforced to be sold. Under the circumstances interest is obtainable to money owners like merchants when they exchange their money with other commodities. In order to abolish interest as unearned income, traditional money has to be converted into 'stamp money', which needs carry-over cost like other commodities in the form of duty to stick stamp of one thousandth amount of face value of paper money weekly (so as to make annual rate of 5%). Stamp money would no longer be able to demand interest, and must continuously stay in a market to be exchanged. Thus it must solve also a decisive cause of depression due to money hoarding. This paper would examine significance and weaknesses in Gesell's theories; such as negligence of profit as a more fundamental form of surplus value in a capitalist society, as well as the logical relevance of his theory of interest. (2)Then this paper treats the ideas and historical significance of local currencies, which were initiated under the strong influence of Gesell's arguments in the early 1930s. In many cases to set up local currencies, the form of stamp money was utilized in order to mitigate the economic distress under the Great Depression in local towns and communities. However, as the national economic recovery policies became strengthened, the central governments and central banks prohibited most of local currencies from a view of unified national budgetary and monetary policies at that period. After several decades, the second wave of upsurge of local currencies has globally been conspicuous in our age of continuous economic crises and restructuring since 1970s. The number of local currencies grew rapidly especially since 1990s, and reached more than two thousands in the world, and more than five hundreds in Japan. They are largely facilitated by development of information technologies such as personal computer and mobile phones. Their forms are no longer limited to stamp paper money, but multiplied. For instance cases of Local Exchange Trading System (LETS) organize mutual debit account system through computerized records, without issuing paper money. In most cases of recent local currencies either in LETS type or in paper money type, interest is not paid for saving or debt, by following Gesell's idea. However, those to charge minus interest rate such as stamp money in Gesell's model became rare. At the same time quite a number of recent local currencies intend to organize equal exchange of labour time by using labour time as unit of account or setting money unit proportional to labour time (say 10 dollars per one hour of labour). This idea is disconnected from Gesell's, and follows the genealogy of labour money presented by Ricardian socialists, or R. Owen. In this genealogy, abolishment of surplus value based on exploitation of

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  • Norihito SHIMANO
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 51 Issue 4 Pages 70-82
    Published: January 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: April 25, 2017
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    The aim of this paper is to examine how financialization affects capital accumulation in Japan from the viewpoint of the spread of shareholder value orientation in Japanese firms. After bubble economy collapse in the beginning of the 1990s, new ideology for corporate governance-"shareholder value orientation"-began to emerge in Japanese firms. The diffusion of shareholder value orientation in firms is one of the most important characteristics of financialization, and there are many empirical studies on the relationship between the change of firms' behavior evoked by this ideology and capital accumulation in US economies. As for Japanese economies, however, there have been no empirical studies on the effect of financialization on capital accumulation from the viewpoint of the spread of shareholder value orientation. In this paper, I make an empirical analysis on how financialization affect capital accumulation in Japan by estimating investment functions which include the proxy variable of the strength of shareholder value orientation in independent variables. As subjects of my empirical research, I choose Japanese non-financial corporation sectors. I also divide these subjects into several industries (manufacturing firms and non manufacturing firms) and several firm sizes(big firms and small-medium firms). And I select dividend payout-capital stock ratio for the proxy variable of Japanese financialization in the investment function because this variable dramatically increase in all categories of subjects of empirical research after 2000s reflecting the diffusion of shareholder orientation in Japanese firms. Theoretically, this significant increase of dividend payout-capital stock ratio may depress capital accumulation because increasing dividend payout reduce internal funds for investment and change firms'management goals from investment for longterm growth to short-term profit for sustaining dividend and stock price. To ascertain this theoretical possibility, I estimate investment function and find interesting results. Dividend payout-capital stock ratio is estimated negatively and statistically significant in the investment function both in the manufacturing and non manufacturing big firms, but is not estimated significantly in the small-medium firms both in the two industries. This means the negative effect of shareholder value orientation on capital accumulation is important for Japanese big firms, but not for Japanese small-medium firms. These results suggest that the spread of shareholder value orientation in Japanese firms decrease capital accumulation especially in big firms after 2000s. This is the effect of financialization on capital accumulation in Japan.
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  • Kenshiro NINOMIYA
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 51 Issue 4 Pages 83-95
    Published: January 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: April 25, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    The recent international monetary crisis, triggered by the 2008 subprime loan crisis in the US, still casts a dark shadow over the world economy. Owing to this upheaval, the financial instability hypothesis proposed by heterodox economist Hyman P. Minsky has received renewed attention. Many mainstream economists admire Minsky's keen insight. The financial instability hypothesis and the formal mathematical models on related topics treat the cumulative debt burden as one of the causes of financial instability. In addition, the Kaleckian and stock-flow consistent models, which explicitly consider interest-bearing debt burden, have, in recent years, been extensively developed. Ninomiya and Tokuda (2011, 2012) introduced the concept of "instability of confidence" and examined the structural change of an economy. In this study, we construct macro-dynamic models that consider interest-bearing debt burdens and the instability of confidence. Furthermore, we examine financial instability and cycles based on the financial instability hypothesis and related mathematical models. This study highlights the following items as significant causes of economic instability: 1)cumulative interest-bearing debt burdens; 2)fragile financial structures; 3)and the instability of confidence. In other words, a robust financial structure plays an important role in addressing a crisis of confidence. This study also suggests that the recent policy of quantitative easing may exert harmful side effects on the economy. This study implies that some new policies and institutional frameworks are needed to construct a robust financial structure. Furthermore, we can prove that there are closed orbits in the dynamic systems by applying Hopf bifurcation theorem. Interest-bearing debt plays important role in terms of financial cycles in this study. The degree of the instability of confidence also has an important role for one of the financial cycles in this study. The financial cycles in this study are quite different from the Kaldorian business cycle.
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  • Takashi SATOH
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 51 Issue 4 Pages 96-98
    Published: January 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: April 25, 2017
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  • Toshio MASUDA
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 51 Issue 4 Pages 99-101
    Published: January 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: April 25, 2017
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  • Mitsuhiko TSURUTA
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 51 Issue 4 Pages 102-104
    Published: January 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: April 25, 2017
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  • Minoru TABATA
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 51 Issue 4 Pages 105-107
    Published: January 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: April 25, 2017
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  • Yasuyuki KURITA
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 51 Issue 4 Pages 108-110
    Published: January 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: April 25, 2017
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  • Akira EBIZUKA
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 51 Issue 4 Pages 111-113
    Published: January 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: April 25, 2017
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  • Naoki TONA
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 51 Issue 4 Pages 114-117
    Published: January 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: April 25, 2017
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  • Tsuyoshi YUKI
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 51 Issue 4 Pages 118-120
    Published: January 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: April 25, 2017
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  • Shuhei MITSUCHI
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 51 Issue 4 Pages 121-123
    Published: January 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: April 25, 2017
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