Welcome to MMT works

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…

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. The weather is cooler than it has been and the last…

I am currently working on developing models that help evaluate the constraints on fiscal expansion in Japan arising from the ageing workforce in the construction sector. The current government under Ms. Takaichi is pursuing what they call a “responsible proactive fiscal policy” that aims to utilise large-scale public investment spending to crowd-in private investment expenditure…