Mission incomplete! This phrase neatly captures the progress made by the Bank of Japan (BOJ) in reflating the economy. In April 2013, under its new governor, the BOJ launched an unprecedented quantitative and qualitative monetary easing policy. Haruhiko Kuroda was certain that the 2% price stability target would be achieved within 2 years. About 4 years later, the BOJ lags behind other major central ...

Central banks are facing a range of growing challenges that have arisen from recent trends in aging populations, low productivity, and new technology and innovation. Growing Central Bank Challenges in the World and Japan offers insights for central banks looking to tackle the most pressing challenges under the global spotlight, starting with low inflation and its related impacts on unconventional ...

Macroeconomic Stabilization in the Digital Age provides insights into factors affecting the macroeconomic management of the economy in the digital age. Policy makers need to be aware of the increasing prominence of the digital economy and digital finance and seek to understand better how continued digitalization will affect policies aimed at managing the economy. For emerging market economies (EMEs), ...

In light of the evolving global economic order and the experiences of the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, this book addresses the important question of how Asia’s regional architecture for economic and financial surveillance, financial safety nets, and crisis management can be strengthened and meshed with those of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Financial Stability Board to ...

Avoiding the “middle-income trap” has become a major topic in the economic literature and a key concern for policy makers, even though a precise definition of it and empirical evidence for it remain elusive. The basic argument is that growth in high-income countries differs qualitatively from that of middle-income countries, and hence requires different factor endowments, industrial structures and ...

Although emerging economies as a group performed well during the global recession, weathering the recession better than advanced economies, there were sharp differences among them and across regions. The emerging economies of Asia had the most favorable outcomes, surviving the ravages of the global financial crisis with relatively modest declines in growth rates in most cases. China and India ...

Income inequality is one of the most profound social, economic, and political challenges of our time. The gap between the rich and the poor has been regarded as a major concern for policy makers. This gap is at its highest level in decades for developed economies, while the inequality trend has been rising in many developing countries. In Asia, despite recent economic growth, income distribution has ...

Group of Twenty (G20) countries are being increasingly exposed to the effects of population aging, such as having an older and shrinking labor force with more retirees. In countries with aged or rapidly aging populations, these trends threaten the sustainability of fiscal institutions, including conventional tax design and pay-as-you-go pensions, and the efficacy of conventional macroeconomic policies ...

The development of financial technology has already radically altered the landscape of the financial system in Asia and promises to have an even greater impact in coming years. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the principles and developments regarding central bank digital currency and fintech. The first part of the book covers the theory of central bank digital currency, regulatory ...

This report analyzes the labor migration trends in Asia and puts them in the context of economic and policy developments and the changes wrought by the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. It examines the policy settings in the major origin and destination countries of labor migrants and the medium- and long-term factors that will shape the future of labor migration in Asia. It further provides ...