Date and Time
April 29, 2008
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Availability
RSVP Required by 5PM April 27

Speaker
Gene Park - 2007-2008 Shorenstein Fellow at Shorenstein APARC

It is often said that domestic politics in Japan revolves around public spending, yet one of the state's most powerful instruments for financing policy has virtually escaped notice: the Fiscal Investment Loan Program (FILP). In contrast to a budget, FILP mobilizes savings for state-directed lending and investment, providing the Japanese state with a mechanism to ‘spend' without taxation. After introducing FILP, this presentation will explain how the government used the program to manage its larger fiscal policy and the consequences of this choice.

Gene Park is a Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow at Shorenstein APARC for 2007-2008. Park is currently working on a book that analyzes how a large government system for mobilizing and allocating financial capital, the Fiscal Investment Loan Program, has influenced budget politics and the internal coalitional dynamics within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

His work has appeared in the journals Governance and Asian Survey, and he co-authored an article for the edited volume, The State after Statism (Harvard University Press). Dr. Park received a Fulbright scholarship to study in Japan. He has been a visiting scholar at the Japanese Ministry of Finance's Policy Research Institute and Sophia University in Tokyo.

Dr. Park completed his PhD in 2007 in political science at University of California, Berkeley. He also holds a masters degree in city and regional planning from Berkeley, and a BA in philosophy from Swarthmore College.