金融危机下日本报业的困境与应对策略

日本素有报业大国之称,但这次金融危机的出现使得日本报业面临发展的困境。面对金融危机,日本报业会采取何种应对策略,引起了越来越多的中日传媒人和专家学者的关注。本文通过分析在金融危机下日本报业面临的发展困境及应对策略,以期为我国报业在金融危机影响下的发展提供些许启示。     

New Challenges for Thailand: Labour and Growth after the Crisis

Exploring the relationship between labour and economic growth in Thailand over the past half century, the article shows that Thailand can no longer rely on an extensive growth regime based on abundant and cheap labour. We argue that Thailand is at a critical juncture and that Thailand cannot avoid shifting to an intensive growth regime based on increases of labour productivity in order to control labour costs and, unlike past regimes, seek ways to ensure that the benefits of growth are better shared.     

Japan Confronts the Global Economic Crisis

In the face of the global economic crisis of 2008–09, Japan has played a positive role in helping to stabilize the regional and global financial systems. Among the positive actions it has taken have been large-scale fiscal and monetary stimulus at home, an unprecedentedly large loan to the International Monetary Fund, liquidity support to South Korea, and a proactive role in G-20 discussions. However, regional arrangements such as the Chiang Mai Initiative have been of minimal importance in preventing financial crises in East Asia. Japan can continue to demonstrate leadership in promoting regional economies and financial systems by expanding its current activities, while ensuring that regional arrangements continue to support global ones.     

The Financial Crisis and America's Capital Dependence on Japan and China

In the Post-Bretton Woods financial system (1972–2009), the United States has been able to borrow heavily from savings-rich countries like Japan and China. Its access to international capital has allowed the US to cover years of extravagant spending and to enjoy unmatched levels of power and plenty. For lenders, like Japan and China, access to the huge US export market has stimulated aggregate demand, which, in turn, has facilitated economic growth, high rates of employment, infrastructure expansion, and technological development.

Notwithstanding the mutual benefits, the massive scale of Post-Bretton Woods imbalances has placed the financial system under stress. Such macro-economic imbalances usually require a major rebalancing—either immediately through a financial crash or gradually through a “soft” landing.

The financial implosion in 2008 constituted a crash landing. To arrest the steep slide into a possible world depression, most of the leading economies, including especially the United States, have taken bold monetary and fiscal measures. However, these expansionary measures will deepen deficits and generate strong inflationary headwinds while placing pressures on currency exchange rates.

Following the 2008 financial earthquake and its wave of after-shocks, America's access to foreign capital is apt to become more restricted and increasingly expensive. This will erode one of the central structural sources of US power—its extraordinary fiscal flexibility, monetary autonomy, and global economic clout. With a weakened financial superpower, the world may become less prosperous, less stable, less predictable, and considerably more dangerous.     

Declining Fertility Rates in Japan: An Ageing Crisis Ahead

The two key impediments to addressing the ageing crisis of Japan are: electoral politics which avoid making hard decisions painful to voters (especially the hiking of the consumption tax), and even more insidious, the norms of Japanese corporations and patriarchal society which discourage women from marrying and producing babies while holding onto a career and aspirations of their own. If Japan’s ageing problem were to persist in the long run, then a concomitant decline in its manufacturing capacity (which underpins its export-dependent economy) and a diminution of its political weight in its international affairs can be anticipated.     

金融危机后日本银行货币政策框架演变与启示

为了应对全球性金融危机对金融系统的冲击,日本银行采用了极为宽松的货币政策,在灵活调整货币政策框架的同时运用了大量传统和非传统的政策工具。文章主要从货币政策目标、货币政策工具以及货币政策传导机制三个方面考察了金融危机后日本银行从传统货币政策体系框架向量化货币政策体系框架的演变过程。日本银行的政策实践对我国进一步完善货币政策框架有一定的借鉴和启示。     

Headlong into the Polanyian Dilemma: The Impact of Middle-Class Moral Panic on the British Government's Response to the Sub-prime Crisis

This article focuses on the discursive construction in Britain of a middle-class moral panic occasioned by the distress caused to self-styled 'responsible mortgage borrowers' by falling house prices. In the context of the move towards asset-based welfare the sub-prime crisis manifested itself most obviously in the popular consciousness as a threat to housing market wealth. The Labour government used the political space opened up by the narrative of middle-class moral panic in order to protect banks' balance sheets from the consequences of their own failed investments in mortgage-backed securities. The ensuing arrangements immunised banks from the implications of market self-regulation in the first-phase response to the sub-prime crisis while simultaneously allowing them to continue to impose the experience of market self-regulation on their customers. An increasingly asymmetric approach to banking regulation has arisen analogous to that which Karl Polanyi associated with the contradictory co-existence of market and non-market forms.     

Nuclear Policy and Regulation in Japan after Fukushima: Navigating the Crisis

The aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, has seen a public debate emerge over the future desirability of nuclear power in Japan. While Japanese citizens’ suspicion of nuclear power has grown, the nuclear industry and electricity utilities have called on the central government to recommission the country’s reactors amid warnings of devastation for the Japanese economy. This article analyses nuclear policy-making in Japan in the aftermath of Fukushima, with the aim to identify key theoretical, institutional and organisational drivers and constraints to future change in Japan’s nuclear energy policy. Despite the growing anti-nuclear sentiment and concerns about the environmental risks of nuclear power, we contend that the continuing power of vested interests will make it difficult for Japan to completely abandon nuclear power during the course of the next decade. However, given the independence of the newly established nuclear regulator and the fact that an effective veto power is held by local government officials, some of whom are opposed to the recommissioning of nuclear plants in their prefectures, we argue that the nuclear policy and regulatory landscape in Japan will undergo moderate change.     

Organised Labour,Dualisation and Labour Market Reform: Korean Trade Union Strategies in Economic and Social Crisis

Labour markets across industrialised countries have seen an increasing polarisation between insiders and outsiders as a result of labour market deregulation and welfare retrenchment, with governments responding to rising pressure from employers. But where are trade unions in this process of labour market deregulation and dualisation? Insider/outsider as well as producer coalition approaches portray organised labour as a structurally conservative force that is ready to prioritise the interests of insiders at the expense of those at the margins of the labour market. Rather than protecting the entire working class, unions are seen as being “complicit” in labour market dualisation that leaves an ever greater number of workers vulnerable. Our examination of the Korean case, though commonly perceived as an example of unions pursuing particularistic interests, does not comply with this image, but shows greater union inclusiveness in the face of socio-economic and socio-political challenges. Understanding the change in Korean trade union strategies, we highlight the critical importance of union identities shifting towards social movement unionism, in addition to the perceived imperative to revitalise the movement in order to remain a meaningful social force.     

In Search of Strategies to Face the Economic Crisis: Evidence from Greek Farms

This study examines the strategies – defensive or aggressive, individual or collective – undertaken by sheep farms in a Greek rural area in order to face the repercussions of the economic crisis and their effects on the productivity and economic performance of these farms. The article presents the results of a farm management survey conducted in 2010 and repeated in 2014 in northern Evros, Greece. The mix of strategies – mainly passive – adopted by farmers shows their confusion in the face of crisis conditions, which has resulted in reduced productivity, more use of family labour and a rise in collective actions.     

Averting a Crisis between Japan and China: A New Way of Thinking

As relations between Japan and China change due to a paradigm shift that has occurred over the past few years, the need for a new security outlook and world view has emerged. In East Asia, the foundation for the relationship between Japan and China must be fairness and justice, and the rule of law. This article proposes ways that Japan and China can work to cultivate common ground that would bring forth the possibility of a new Japan-China relationship based on the “strategic reciprocal relationship” established in 2006.     

The Hidden Ingredient: Female Labour in Chilean Fruit Exports

Abstract — The Chilean fruit export sector has expanded rapidly over the past decade. A large army of female temporary workers is recruited annually to work in the fruit export sector, playing a key role in the preparation of high quality off-season fruit for northern markets. Despite their annual employment in a modern export sector, these temporary workers remain a marginalised force in Chile, reflected in the significant underestimation of the female agricultural labour force. This paper examines the reasons for their marginalisation. the gender segmentation of the temporary fruit labour market, and considers the potential effect of increased international competition on the employment of female temporary labour.     

The Interenterprise Arrears Crisis in Russia

Two American economists discuss in considerable detail the critical problem of interenterprise arrears (overdue payments for goods and services) in Russia that undermines the transition to a market economy and privatization. The study is based on interviews involving directors of 32 industrial enterprises, managers of commercial banks, and Central Bank officials in Moscow, Novosibirsk and Sochi from May to mid-November 1992. In addition to analyzing the causes of the mounting accumulation of debt and highlighting the financial problems of enterprises coping with the crisis, the authors examine the anatomy of present-day banking and extension of credit to finance production in the former USSR. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: P21, Ol7, G20.     

Can smartphones empower labour migrants? The case of Kyrgyzstani migrants in Russia

ABSTRACT

In the last two decades, mobile phones and new technologies have transformed migration. Some scholars argue that they help empower migrants, who are otherwise often marginalized in their host country. We discuss the extent to which this is true for Kyrgyz labour migrants in Russia, a relatively large diaspora that suffers from multiple levels of disempowerment, ranging from precarious living and working conditions to a lack of legal support and representation from their home government. Relying on fieldwork conducted in Kyrgyzstan in 2017 and 2018, we explore the extent to which smartphones are enabling Kyrgyz labour migrants in Russia to be informed about migration rules, help each other abroad, connect as a diaspora, and discuss important diaspora topics. Our findings are relevant beyond academia, as many international and governmental agencies are trying to assist migrants through technology; they also point to several missed opportunities for these organizations.     

朝鲜核危机与日朝关系正常化

2002年10月美国总统特使凯利访问平壤,美朝之间围绕朝鲜核开发计划的争执逐步升级,在朝鲜半岛上爆发了核危机.受其冲击,本来激情跃进的日朝关系正常化进程也受到了影响.日本借核危机之机提升军力、迈向"普通国家"给双边关系带来了巨大影响,加之其它诸多因素的作用,日朝关系正常化还有一段很长的路要走.     

The regional politics of scale: revisiting the functional aspects of the labour market dualism

This article seeks to revisit Arthur Lewis’s theory of labour market dualism, while focusing on human resource development in the form of labour productivity, to explain its usefulness in the Caribbean Community’s (CARICOM) contemporary policy discourses around non-economic integration in an era that is now classified as the Caribbean Educational Policy Space. The focus is on how key assumptions around labour productivity, and the lessons that can be deduced from analysing historical and contemporary policy initiatives, present plausible applicability to an expanding Caribbean single market and the proposed creation of the Caribbean single economy. In focusing on the discursive elements of labour productivity, it is contextualized that the free movement of skilled labour within CARICOM illustrates labour market dualism.     

The puzzle of manual harvest in Uzbekistan: economics,status and labour in the Khrushchev era

Uzbekistan has attracted international criticism for its use of child labour, defined as labour performed by youth under the Soviet legal limit of 16, to harvest cotton by hand. This article argues that manual labour, mostly performed by low-status children and women, became entrenched in Central Asian agriculture during the 1950s, and investigates the possible reasons for its persistence in the face of global trends to the contrary. The timing is a puzzle, because the 1950s were when mechanization of agriculture became a global development goal. The USSR participated in the mechanization trend. To understand better the roots of rural labour patterns in the Khrushchev period, we must consider how economic incentives and disincentives, gender relations, demographics, and state policy worked together.