This is a comparative study of fiscal policy under finance minister Takahashi in prewar Japan and the New Deal period in prewar United States, based on fiscal sociology approach which receives increasing attention recently. The arguments and implications are as follows; 1. Fiscal Sociology recognizes the nature of public finance as distinct from that of the market, and intends to grasp it within its interactions with society as a whole. It also focuses on policy making processes where actors with diverse interests interact, in order to find the momentum behind epochal societal changes. 2. The New Deal finance and Takahashi finance are known by the fact that they both achieved economic recovery with active spending policy. However, they differ significantly in the way relief programs were implemented, how they covered up fiscal deficits, the timeliness of policy change, and tax policy. This paper discusses these differences by clarifying institutions and related factors in both cases, such as fiscal ideas held by political leaders, the interrelationship between the central bank and finance ministry, and budgeting system. 3. Fiscal policy under the New Deal period was limited in intensifying taxation and implement ing public work programs swiftly, due to the idea of balanced budget held by Roosevelt, high autonomy in decision making by the FRB, divided policymaking power, etc. 4. Takahashi finance, in contrast, achieved drastic upturn of the economy by swiftly employing fiscal measures. The institutional settings behind it were the concentration of budgeting power to the administration (especially the ministry of finance) and weak autonomy of the central bank. However, the same institutional characteristics caused relentless increase in military spending and heavy reliance on central bank credit when some tightening in fiscal policy was called for. 5. Based upon comparative discussion above, this paper criticizes dichotomous conceptualization of "New Deal" and "Fascism", and also shows the relationship between fiscal sociology and such studies as welfare state studies, systems theory, and pluralistic theory of the state.

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Capital Levy, or the property tax, which was levied as a temporary tax for just one time on individuals for the purpose of securing the state income and of redistributing the wealth among national strata, was started in February 1947. The purpose of this paper is first, to clarify the actual conditions of the taxation of Capital Levy on parasitic landlords. Second, to describe the role of Capital Levy in the process of the dissolution of landlordism or in the extinction of landlord class, in connection with land reform. And, third, to pinpoint the peculiar significance of the state or the public finance in the conversion of class composition from prewar to postwar period. The paper will give concrete instances to bolster the findings of this research. The analysis here is focused on three big landlords; the Ichijima family, a thousand cho landlord in Niigata prefecture, whose management was overwhelmingly based on the vast lands in its possession. The Nezu family, the second biggest landlord in Yamanashi prefecture, which shifted to possession of securities rather than relying on its possession of the lands and stuck fast to the profits in the capital market, while gradually reducing the scale of its lands. And the Shirose family, a thousand cho landlord in Niigata prefecture, which had both the two managerial characteristics mentioned above and, therefore, it can be said that it had a middle character between the former two families. My conclusion is therefore that, all of these families did not succeed in lightening the burden of Capital Levy by means of taking advantage of the rising inflation, and thus could not help falling from their status as men of property. It means that they lost their status as the class of investers or the men living on the interest of their securities because of the Capital Levy. All this occurred while they were losing their status as landowners because of the progress of land reform. The taxation of Capital Levy after the war was therefore instrumental in the dissolution of the mechanism of "the conversion of the rent into the capital". The dissolution of the mechanism as mentioned above together with land reform thus contributed to the destruction of the semifeudalistic landlordism, the structural link which had been indispensable to Japanese Capitalism.

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Finance of the Japanese colonies (Korea, Formosa, Sakhalin, Kwantung Province, and the South Sea Islands) were incorporated by the Public Account Acts and Regulations into the national finance as a whole, and through the money transferred from the Funds for Public Finance they were operated in close relationship with other special accounts. Annual expenditure was greatest in Korea, and the expenditure for the other colonies stood in such a descending order as Formosa, Sakhlin, Kwantung Province, and the South Sea Islands. Those expenditures increased or decreased corresponding to similar changes in the national General Account. Among the various items of expenditure, the biggest (except those of the government enterprises peculiar to each colony, such as the railway in Korea, the monopoly corporation in Formosa, the communication enterprise in Kwantung Province, and forestry and the railway in Sakhalin) was the police expenditure to suppress the national liberation movements in Korea and Formosa. Industrial expenditure represented a relatively greater weight in Formosa than in Korea as there was a difference of industrial policies. As a rule, the Policy in Formosa was more development oriented. With respect to public works, investment was largely made on roads in Korea and on irrigation works in Formosa. Educational expenditure showed a rapid increase both in the colonial governments finances and in local finances, but the local finances bore rather heavy share. The revenue consisted of tax, profit from the government enterprises, grant-in-aid from the General Account, public loans, and the balance carried forward from the previous fiscal year. All the colonies but Korea and Kwantung Province ceased receiving the grant-in-aid at certain dates. The characteristics of the tax structure in Korea and Formosa were as follows: (1) Central were the two categories of tax, that is to say, profit tax consisting mainly of land tax consumption tax such as custom duties, liquor tax, sugar tax, etc., while income tax accounted for a small proportion. (2) The system of income tax tended to a large extent to reinforce accumulation of the Japanese capital. (3) Custom duties were subject to the Japanese tarrif system. (4) Liquor tax system in Korea was planned not to destroy native brewers. Public loans and grant-in-aid were not to be neglected in the colonies as the revenues there depended less on tax. In conclusion, finances in the Japanese colonies, in terms of their systems and of their specific functions, tended to swell the expenditure. Powerful authority of administration and legislation given to the colonial governments strengthened this tendency all the more. Transfer of the Funds for Public Finance from the colonial finances to the 'Special Accounts of Extraordinary Military Expenditure' turned the nature of the former into that of wartime finances, which meant collapse of the colonial finances themselves.

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The ratio of the Japanese government long-term debt to GDP in 2006 is 117%. It is the worst in OECD countries. Japan is in the extraordinary situation where the Japanese government has to spend over 40% of its tax revenue to national debt service. A moment of great crisis of national bankruptcy is coming. However the Japanese government continues to issue the ten-year Japanese Government bonds with a very low coupon rate, while every year it must get huge money by government bond from a financial market already suffering its oversupply. At first this paper focuses on the historical accumulation of the Japanese government bonds. One of the major factors that allowed the Japanese government to expand public finance depending on government bond is article 4 of the Public Finance Law. Issuing construction bonds to finance public work has no limit except approval by Parliament according to this article. Secondly this paper discusses the credibility of the state or the government as a borrower. The economic power of the state to levy tax is originally based on the political power of the state as a political subject. Therefore the economic power of the state dually influences a relationship between creditor and debtor as market mechanism. Although it usually strengthens the credibility of the state as a borrower, it might ruin its creditors facing a crucial fiscal crisis.

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This is a comparative study of the important problems posed by the imperial finances in Korea and Japan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when both states were trying to form a modern financial system, in other words, a 'tax state'. Both had to overcome the 'doctrine of imperial land' (the notion that all lands in the country belong to the sovereign). Korea applied the doctrine of imperial ownership of all land up to the time of the last land survey, never developing doctrines and institutions to justify levying taxes on citizens once their rights to land ownership had been recognised. Japan, however, severed the relation between the king's sovereign power over land and the right to ownership of that land. The doctrine of imperial land' was replaced by the principle that taxes were the expenses paid by the members of the national community for the upkeep of the community. In this regard, it can be said that the concept of taxation in the Japanese Imperial Constitution had advanced one step further than the sovereign's tax of Korea. Even so, the Japanese system failed to establish the reciprocal right of citizens to agree to the levying of taxes.

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戦後,農村を中心とする縁辺地域では過疎化の進展とともに小中学校の再編成が行われてきたが,義務教育サービスの経済的側面である義務教育財政の地域的特徴を探る研究は,経済地理学のみならず,地方財政学,教育財政学などにおいてもほとんどなされてこなかった.本稿は縁辺地域である島根県の市町村中学校費を例にとり,都市地域とのマクロな比較のからその特徴を捉えた上で,タイル尺度を用いて不均等度を測定することから,よりミクロな視点で縁辺地域における義務教育財政の地域的特徴を検討したものである.分析結果から次のような知見が得られた.(1)縁辺地域の市町村中学校費は都市地域との比較から,その推移に特徴がみられ,サービス享受者の変動には影響を受けずに変動している.(2)よりミクロに検討すると,過疎地域において単位人口あたりの市町村中学校費の不均等は増大している.その中でも,様々な付帯施設が必要なアクセシビリティの水準が低いグループにおいて不均等が大きい.また,人口規模では,「昭和の大合併」や中学校再編成が行われなかった町村が多い,最も人口規模が小さいグループで,近年になって中学校施設の更新に伴う不均等が目立つようになっている.(3)どのような空間分割において,いかなる特徴があるかを検討してみると,人口規模の均等化を目指した小選挙区に基づくグルーピングではグループ間の不均等度は小さくなる傾向がみられた.

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The tendency toward sectionalism is especially pronounced in the higher levels of Japanese bureaucracy because each ministry separately and independently carries out its personnel administration. Within this bureaucracy the Finance Ministry occupies a relatively advantageous position, and to a certain extent, controls other ministries. The conservative fusion led to a significant rise in the bureaucracy's political influence. This development happened to coincide with the “growth” of the economy. The result is the marked increase in the influence of the Ministry of Trade and Industry, directly responsible for promoting the economic “growth policy”, and the Finance Ministry, responsible for controlling economic growth as a whole. The author analyzes the Income Doubling Plan, the crux of the “growth policy”, to ascertain the value system of the bureaucrats in solving or not solving political as well as economic difficulties. He concludes that the bureaucrats at first resisted and then accepted the “growth policy” in both instances because of and in order to defend their value system of “honesty and steadfastness”.
1. The economic bureaucrat as power holder.
2. Income Doubling Plan.
3. Value system of economic bureaucrats.

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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the Great Depression in the United States of America from the viewpoint of the financial crisis. As is generally known, the economic crisis of 1929 spread out on an international scale, and after that there was the very long depression in the 1930 s. In this paper, I examined the process from the following views. First of all, this economic crisis was brought on at the highest stage of capitalism. For that reason, the development of this crisis was brought under the conditions of the economic structure over which monopoly capital had control. Secondly, I considered how this crisis was influenced by the structural characteristics of American capitalism which had the industrial development in the North and the underdeveloped agriculture in the South. And the following decisions were led by these views. (1) The essence of the financial crisis, which meant that the production based on the credit was broken up by the dullness of sale, was in existence during the Great Depression in the United States of America. (2) And the crisis is classified into two types. These are the financial crisis caused by the conflicts of monopoly capital accumulation and reproduction (type A) and the one caused by the conflicts of small capital accumulation and reproduction (type B). The stock market crash (1929), the decline of bond prices (1931-32) and the banking crisis (1933) come under the former. The failures of small businesses and the suspensions of small banks through the Great Depression come under the latter. In other words, the financial crisis (type A) was fundamentally caused by the overproduction of heavy industries, and appeared as the financial disturbances around the securities exchanges. The financial crisis (type B) was fundamentally caused by the overproduction of light industries, and appeared as the financial disturbances around the money markets which were subordinate to the finance capitals. Such developments were the important characteristics of the financial crisis (1929-33) in the United States of America.

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