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The social instability in France is now spreading throughout Europe. Already there are mass protests in Spain and Portugal, Belgium, Italy, and Albania. In France, initially students began protesting over conditions in the schooling system, but the grievances and parties involved have broadened out and the increasingly chaotic scenes in Paris have spread out to…

The labour market contraction that I have been signalling for the last three months continued in September. The rising unemployment rate and the declining employment levels are all down to the work of the RBA and its ridiculous interest rate increases. Given the lag in interest rates impacting on the real economy, the current labour…

This weekly report will provide some insights into life for a westerner (me) who is working for an extended period at Kyoto University in Japan but who over the years of working here has increasingly began to understand the language and local cultural traditions. Kurama – the hot spring that isn’t! I have resisted travelling…

I know I am venturing into the world shared by sociologists, cultural anthropologists, cultural historians, and economists in the current research that I am pursuing. The question is whether traditional Japanese values are compatible with a mainstream ideology that pursues ever increasing GDP growth as a goal, if not a reality. The current Japanese government…

In this blog post, I am continuing my work on examining the constraints in the Japanese infrastructure sector that would reduce the effectiveness of the fiscal expansion that the current government is proposing as a strategy to kickstart the economy and lift productivity. One approach is to decompose employment changes in the sector into the…