Stanford Conference on "The Political Economy of Japan under the Abe Government"

February 8 - February 9, 2018

Philippines Conference Room

Sponsored by: Japan Society for Promotion of Science, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (Stanford University), and Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center (Stanford University)

Organizers: Takeo Hoshi and Phillip Lipscy

Program

2/8/2018

8:30am     Breakfast
 

9:15am     Welcome remarks
                 Gi-Wook Shin (Stanford University)
                Toru Tamiya (Japan Society for Promotion of Science)
 

9:30am  "Transformation of the Japanese Political System: Expansion of the Power of the Japanese Prime Minister", Harukata Takenaka (National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies)

Discussant:
Saori Katada (University of Southern California)
 

10:30am  Break
 

10:50am  "Constitutional Revision Under the Abe Administration", Kenneth McElwain (University of Tokyo)

Discussant:
Yu Jin Woo (Stanford University)

11:50am  Lunch
 

1:00pm    "Do election results reflect voters' policy preferences? Evidence from the 2017 Japanese general election", Yusaku Horiuchi (Dartmouth College), Shiro Kuriwaki (Ph.D, Harvard University), Daniel Smith (Harvard University)

Discussant:
Rob Weiner (Naval Postgraduate School)

2:00pm   "Japan's Security Policy in 'the Abe Era': Radical Transformation or Evolutionary Shift?", Adam Liff (Indiana University)

Discussant:
Ashten Seung Cho (Stanford University)

3:00pm  Break
 

3:20pm   "Abenergynomics: The Politics of Energy and Climate Change under Abe", Trevor Incerti (Yale University) and Phillip Lipscy (Stanford University)

Discussant:
Kent Calder (Johns Hopkins SAIS)

4:20pm   "Innovation Policy", Kenji Kushida (Stanford University)

Discussant:
John Zysman (University of California, Berkeley)
 

5:20pm     Adjourn
 

6:30pm     Group Dinner

2/9/2018

9:00am   Breakfast
 

9:30am   "Abenomics, Monetary Policy, and Consumption", Joshua Hausman (University of Michigan), Takashi Unayama (Hitotsubashi University), and Johannes Wieland (University of California, San Diego)

Discussant:
Huiyu Li (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco)
 

10:30am  Break

10:50am "The Great Disconnect: The Decoupling of Wage and Price Inflation in Japan", Takeo Hoshi (Stanford University) and Anil Kashyap (University of Chicago)

Discussants:
Joshua Hausman (University of Michigan)
Johannes Wieland (University of California, San Diego)
 

11:50pm  Lunch
 

1:00pm  "Corporate Governance Reform", Hideaki Miyajima (Waseda University)

Discussant:
Curtis Milhaupt (Stanford University)
 

2:00pm   "Womenomics", Nobuko Nagase (Ochanomizu University)

Discussant:
Steve Vogel (University of California, Berkeley)
 

3:00pm  Break
 

3:20pm  "Japanese Agricultural Reform Under Abe Shinzo: Two Steps Forward, A Half-Step Back?", Patricia Maclachlan (University of Texas at Austin) and Kay Shimizu (University of Pittsburgh)

Discussant:
Takatoshi Ito (Columbia University and National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies)
 

4:20pm   "Yen Depreciation and Competitiveness of Japanese Firms", Kyoji Fukao (Hitotsubashi University) and Shuichiro Nishioka (West Virginia University)

Discussant:
Katheryn Russ (University of California, Davis)
 

5:20pm  "Next Step", Takeo Hoshi (Stanford University) and Phillip Lipscy (Stanford University)
 

5:50pm  Adjourn

Calling all Stanford students! Join us to learn about FSI's student opportunities during the summer. FSI has internship positions in policy organizations in over 15 countries. Our programs are fully-funded and mentored by FSI faculty. You will have the chance to speak directly to former interns.

Visit our website for more info: http://fsi.stanford.edu/studentprograms

For a democracy, a necessary condition is openness to new political ideas. New ideas are often carried by new political parties. New parties are confronted with all kinds of reactions by established actors. What electoral effects do political, legal and media reactions have? Joost will present empirical evidence from experimental and non-experimental studies (in 15 countries since 1944) on reactions to various new parties, including anti-immigration parties.

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Confronting a declining population and increased aging, the government of Japan currently implements measures for Regional Revitalization (chiho sosei), a policy to vitalize local economies by shaping “a social framework more amenable to bearing and raising children.” One of the most important policy issues to shape such a framework is to secure employment opportunities in regional economies, and establishment of new firms, or startups, plays a significant role in providing new employment opportunities.

For the success of startups, money (fund raising) is the chief obstacle because startups are rarely creditworthy and have significant asymmetry of information on its repayment ability with lenders. Such firms have difficulty in raising funds, or financial constraint, and cannot help but depend on internal funds from their CEOs or families. Whether and to what extent do startups confront with financial constraint? How does finance matter for the performance of startups? And first of all, how do various types of startups raise funds?

To answer these questions, Uchida currently leads a research project on startup finance in Japan with support from a large-scale research grant in Japan (JSPS Kakenhi). In this seminar, he reports findings from this ongoing project. He presents an overview of, and some empirical results on, the current statu of startups firms and startup finance in Japan using publicly available data and data from original surveys that his research team has conducted. He also provides some findings from international comparisons with findings from the U.S., which he currently undertakes as a visiting scholar at APARC (with support from Abe Fellowship).

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Hirofumi Uchida joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) during the 2017-2018 academic year from the Kobe University’s Graduate School of Business Administration where he serves as a professor of Banking and Finance.

Uchida’s research interests focus on banking, financial institutions, and financial system architecture. During his stay at Shorenstein APARC, Uchida will conduct research on startup finance in the U.S. from the perspective of an international comparison with Japan. For this research, he receives Abe Fellowship (Social Science Research Council).

Uchida's research has been published in International Economic Review, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Journal of Financial Intermediation, Economica, and Journal of Banking and Finance, among others. He is also an associate editor of Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, and a member of the Study Group for Earthquake and Enterprise Dynamics (SEEDs) and the Money & Finance Research Group (MoFiR). 

Uchida received his M.A. in Economics in 1995 and his Ph.D. in Economics in 1999, both from Osaka University. Prior to joining Kobe University in 2009, Uchida was with the Kyoto Institute for Economic Research at Kyoto University, and the Faculty of Economics at Wakayama University. He was also a visiting scholar at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University as a 2003 Fulbright Scholar.

Sponsored by: Stanford University Libraries, Hoover Institution,

Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law

Even before the 2016 election campaign, political polarization and filter bubbles in social media and revelations of foreign meddling, Francis Fukuyama raised his concerns about the decline and decay of democracy in the U.S. and elsewhere. Today we live in a new environment where Americans and others get up to two-thirds of their news — real and otherwise — on Facebook, where Twitter bots magnify propaganda, and where foreigners posing as Americans even organize demonstrations and counter-demonstrations on social media. Yet even without these technological developments, from Eastern Europe to the U.S., we observe the re-emergence of demons we thought we left behind after World War II: the rise of blood and soil nationalism, the decline in rule of law and the institutions that uphold democratic governance: parliaments, courts, a free and unfettered press. We believed that through NATO, the WTO, and the EU democracy and peace would be firmly grounded. What happens when these international organizations begin to unravel? Where are we headed? What have we learned so we can avoid the disasters of the 1930s? What are the fundamental institutional reforms we need to make? How do we accommodate the new superpower China, with its alternative model of governance, not only domestically, but increasingly in the international sphere? These questions will be discussed in a conversation by Toomas Hendrik Ilves and Francis Fukuyama.

Speakers:

Toomas Hendrik Ilves is the former President of Estonia (2006–2016). He has previously also served as Estonian foreign minister, member of European Parliament, and the ambassador of Estonia in Washington. In 2017 Ilves joined Stanford University as a Bernard and Susan Liautaud Visiting Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford’s hub for researchers tackling some of the world’s most pressing security and international cooperation problems. He is currently Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Hoover Institution.

Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Mosbacher Director of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also a professor by courtesy in the Department of Political Science. Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues relating to questions concerning democratization and international political economy. His book, The End of History and the Last Man, was published by Free Press in 1992 and has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent book is Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy.

While much of the existing literature examines vote buying in the context of party systems, including both competitive and hegemonic party systems, this talk, based on a study coauthored by Professor Susan Whiting, addresses vote buying in a context in which no political party effectively structures electoral competition—village elections in China. This study argues that the lure of non-competitive rents explains variation over time and space in the phenomenon of vote buying. It tests this hypothesis, derived from an in-depth case study, in a separate sample of 1200 households in 62 villages in five provinces, using villagers’ reports of vote buying in elections and survey data on land takings as an indicator of available rents. While the literature views the introduction of elections as increasing accountability of village leaders to voters, vote buying likely undermines accountability. This study suggests that the regime has tolerated vote buying as a means of identifying and coopting influential economic elites in rural communities.

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China has undergone historic economic, social and cultural transformations since its Opening and Reform. Leading scholars explore expanding repertoires of control that this authoritarian regime – both central and local – are using to manage social fissures, dislocation and demands. What new strategies of governance has the Chinese state devised to manage its increasingly fractious and dynamic society? What novel mechanisms has the state innovated to pre-empt, control and de-escalate contention? China Program’s 2018 Winter Colloquia Series highlights cutting-edge research on contemporary means that various levels of the Chinese state are deploying to manage both current and potential discontent from below.

Who watches over the party-state? In this talk, Maria Repnikova examines the uneasy partnership between critical journalists and the state in China. More than a passive mouthpiece or a dissident voice, the media in China also plays a critical oversight role, one more frequently associated with liberal democracies than with authoritarian systems. Chinese central officials cautiously endorse media supervision as a feedback mechanism, as journalists carve out space for critical reporting by positioning themselves as aiding the agenda of the central state. By comparing media politics in the Soviet Union, contemporary Russia and China, her talk will highlight the distinctiveness of Chinese journalist-state relations, as well as renewed pressures facing journalists in the Xi era.

[[{"fid":"229579","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto","alt":"","title":""},"type":"media","field_deltas":{"7":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto","alt":"","title":""}},"link_text":null,"attributes":{"style":"margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 15px; padding: 0px; float: left; height: 350px; width: 250px;","class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto","data-delta":"7"}}]]Maria Repnikova is a scholar of political communication in illiberal contexts, with a focus on Chinese media politics. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Global Communication and a Director of the Center for Global Information Studies at Georgia State University. Maria's work examines critical journalism, political propaganda, cyber nationalism, and global media branding in China, drawing on comparisons to Russia. Her work appeared in the China Quarterly, New Media & Society, Journal of Contemporary China, as well as in Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, amongst other venues. Her book, Media Politics in China: Improvising Power Under Authoritarianism, was just published by Cambridge University Press. Maria was a post-doctoral fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication. Maria holds a PhD in Politics from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.

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China has undergone historic economic, social and cultural transformations since its Opening and Reform. Leading scholars explore expanding repertoires of control that this authoritarian regime – both central and local – are using to manage social fissures, dislocation and demands. What new strategies of governance has the Chinese state devised to manage its increasingly fractious and dynamic society? What novel mechanisms has the state innovated to pre-empt, control and de-escalate contention? China Program’s 2018 Winter Colloquia Series highlights cutting-edge research on contemporary means that various levels of the Chinese state are deploying to manage both current and potential discontent from below.