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Session 15: Economic Reform in Germany and Japan
Germany and Japan are critical members of the world economy. Both nations have faced dramatic changes in their economic situations and policy environments, both face the rise of new competitors, both have rapidly aging populations, and both have worked to reform their old policy structures. What has worked, what has not, and what remains to be done?
Links of Interest
Peterson Institute of International Economics
Center for Business and Government, Harvard University
Presentations
Jun Kurihara: Demystifying Japan's Economic Recovery - A Tale of its Structural Reform
Jorg W. Decressin: Economic Reform in Germany
Speakers
Catherine Mann
Professor of Economics
Brandeis University
and Senior Fellow
Peterson Institute of International Economics, moderator
Adam Posen
Senior Fellow
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Adam Posen, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics since 1997, focuses on macroeconomic policy in the industrial democracies, European and Japanese political economy, economics and national security, and central banking issues. A widely cited expert on monetary policy, he has been a visiting scholar at central banks worldwide, including on multiple occasions at the Federal Reserve Board, the European Central Bank, and the Deutsche Bundesbank. In 2006 he was on sabbatical from the Peterson Institute as a Houblon-Norman Senior Fellow at the Bank of England. He has also been a consultant to several US government agencies (including the Departments of State and Treasury and the Council of Economic Advisors); the European Commission; the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry; and the International Monetary Fund on fiscal, monetary, trade, and foreign policy issues.
Dr. Posen is the author of the forthcoming Institute book Reform and Growth in a Rich Country: Germany, which is partially supported by a major grant from the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and Restoring Japan’s Economic Growth (Institute for International Economics, 1998; Japanese translation, 1999); coauthor with Ben Bernanke et al. of Inflation Targeting: Lessons from the International Experience (Princeton University Press, 1999); and editor and part-author of three collected volumes: The Euro at Five: Ready for a Global Role? (Institute for International Economics, 2005), The Future of Monetary Policy (Blackwell, forthcoming), and The Japanese Financial Crisis and its Parallels with U.S. Experience (Institute for International Economics, 2000; Japanese translation, 2001). He has also published more than 30 papers on monetary and fiscal policy in leading economics journals, academic and central bank conference volumes. He cofounded the refereed journal International Finance (Blackwell).
He is a frequent contributor to the opinion page of the Financial Times and has also published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Die Zeit, and Nihon Keizai Shimbun, among many other leading newspapers and magazines. He is the economics editor of The International Economy magazine and appears frequently on financial news television programs. He also is a private consultant on fixed-income markets and central bank behavior to some of the leading global financial companies and private investment firms.
From 1994 to 1997, he was an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he advised senior management on monetary strategies (including inflation targeting), the G-7 economic outlook, and European monetary unification. In 1993–94, he was Okun Memorial Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution and won the Amex Bank Review Awards Silver Medal for his dissertation research on central bank independence. In 1992–93, he was resident in Germany as a Bosch Foundation Fellow. He received his Ph.D. and his A.B. (Phi Beta Kappa) from Harvard University, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow.
Dr. Posen is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has served on a number of Council task forces, as well as a member of the Steering Committee of the Princeton Project on National Security. He has been a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin (in 2001), fellow of the CESifo Research Network, and research associate of the Center for the Japanese Economy and Business of Columbia University.
Jun Kurihara
Fellow, Center for Business and Government, Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
Jun Kurihara, a Senior Fellow, was a Senior Economist at the Fujitsu Research Institute (FRI) in Japan. His research focuses on Japan's industrial rejuvenation from the perspective of venture capital activity. In addition to his work with FRI, he has taught at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, chaired the Working Group on Economic Statistics and served as a Senior Member of the Japan Statistics Council for the Government of Japan. Kurihara earned his Masters degree in 1993 from Kyoto University. While at M-RCBG, he is conducting research on Japan's response to globalization with Dennis Encarnation, Director of the Asia-Pacific Policy Program.
Jorg W. Decressin
Division Chief, European Policies Division, European Departmen
International Monetary Fund
Heading the European Policies Division at the IMF, Jörg Decressin develops economic policy advice to the Eurogroup, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank. A German national, he joined the IMF after he obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1993. He has published on labor an capital market adjustment in Europe, the reform of the Stability and Growth Pact, and is currently working on an book on financial integration in Europe, to be published by the IMF in May 2007 (Integrating Europe’s Financial Markets).
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