As Japan's decade-long economic stagnation continues, there has been much analysis of the immediate macroeconomic problems that confront the Japanese economy. This book looks past the short-run challenges to the future of Japan and highlights the intermediate and longer-term issues that country faces.

In this, the first book-length academic treatment of this important issue, a team of notable contributors present nine papers, offering a comprehensive assessment of those economic difficulties and addressing a range of specific issues, from financial restructuring and the impact of the aging Japanese population to corporate behavior, public lending, employment practices, and innovative capacity. In each paper, contributors clearly identify and outline problems and concerns, carefully pose provocative questions, and in many instances present concrete suggestions for improvement.

The resulting volume is a timely and important examination of critical issues for Japan's stalling economy, packed with both telling data and expert analysis and offering valuable perspectives on Japan's current obstacles.

In this timely volume emanating from the National Bureau of Economic Research's program in international economics, leading economists address recent developments in three important areas. The first section of the book focuses on international comparisons of output and prices, and includes papers that present new measures of product market integration, new methodology to infer relative factor price changes from quantitative data, and an ongoing capital stock measurement project. The next section features articles on international trade, including such significant issues as deterring child labor exploitation in developing countries, exchange rate regimes, and mapping U. S. comparative advantage across various factors. The book concludes with research on multinational corporations and includes a discussion of the long-debated issue of whether growth of production abroad substitutes for or is complementary to production growth at home. The papers in the volume are dedicated to Robert E. Lipsey, who for more than a half century at the NBER, contributed significantly to the broad field of empirical international economics.