Abenomics and financial markets

Funder: Toshiba Foundation

Co-investigator: Ewa Karwowski

Collaborative project with SOAS, UEL and University of Portsmouth.

This project is financed by the Toshiba Foundation and it aims to understand the experience of financial instability in Japan since deflation set in during the 1990s, and on a more careful study of developments in Japanese money and financial markets to assess the impact of policy on the debt structures that appear to have caused Japan’s deflation. This impact is poorly understood because the usual approach to economic policy is to treat the real economy as the object of policy with the credit system acting as channels of policy transmission.

The project brings together and intensifies cooperation between the UK and Japanese researchers. The outcome of this co-operation will provide general policy guidance for policy makers facing deflationary pressures as well as executives in international financial institutions such as BIS, IMF and the World Bank which are currently concerned with the issue of advanced-country slow-down and the threat of deflation. In this sense, the overarching goal of the project is to serve economic prosperity of society at large through the lessons learnt based on the research outcomes.