Toshihiro Ihori Libros

This book investigates the reasons for persistent public deficits and delayed fiscal reform in Japan, placing a special emphasis on political economy aspects. Japan is confronted with the need to pursue fiscal discipline for fiscal consolidation and implement structural reforms for reorganizing fiscal expenditures. Focusing on particular policy fields including social security, female labor supply, public works, and intergovernmental transfer schemes, the book clarifies economic and political elements that have hindered effective steps toward these two goals. Facing population aging and a business downturn, the Japanese government was urged to increase social security expenditures and the budget for Keynesian stimulus policies. As elucidated in the book, the institutional design has worked to over-represent the demands of elderly generations and local interest groups and to expand these expenditures. Rigorous theoretical and numerical analyses reported throughout the book consequently provide readers with insights into incentive designs and institutional reforms necessary for fiscal consolidation, also presenting points of view for public policy and public debate.

This textbook provides a comprehensive overview of macroeconomic and microeconomic public finance, addressing a gap in standard offerings that typically focus on microeconomic topics. It emphasizes theoretical and empirical tools to explore key economic issues in advanced countries, particularly Japan. Topics include the macroeconomic impacts of fiscal policy, government deficit financing through bonds, and social security reform. The main text covers fundamental concepts, while the appendix delves into advanced topics, making it suitable for various courses on fiscal policy and reform.

Conventional wisdom dictates that a fiscal policy should be counter-cyclical. However, contrary to this conventional views, recent research has demonstrated that fiscal policy is actually procyclical in most developing countries. In this book, we attempt to propose a new interpretation of this procyclicality after reviewing theoretical and empirical evolution of the research. In particular, by incorporating the political effort behavior of private agents into a weak government model, we explore how income fluctuations affect the optimal budget deficits in a political economy. If the government can control the political behavior, normally, the optimal budget deficit should rise in a recession as a first-best case; however, interestingly, a recession does not necessarily prompt an increase in the budget deficits in a second-best political economy. The response of the budget deficits to income fluctuations mainly depends on the efficiency of political effort, which may correspond to the degree of democracy and bureaucratic efficiency of the governments. We test the prediction of the pro-cyclical fiscal policy and find it applicable for democratic countries with semi-efficient governments including Japan.