IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/udedao/402001.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The role of Japanese local governments in stabilisation policy

Author

Listed:
  • Pascha, Werner
  • Robaschik, Frank

Abstract

Local governments in Japan account for about 80 per cent of general government spending when excluding social security expenditures. Therefore, for the implementation of fiscal policy it is important how local governments will behave. On the basis of the economic theories on fiscal federalism it is generally rational for local government entities, especially smaller ones, not to participate in the stabilisation policy of the central government and to take a free rider position. Such a behaviour would imply a substantial reduction or even an offsetting of the effects of a stabilisation policy of the central government. As for empirical evidence, a procyclical behaviour of local entities was observed in several countries, among them Germany. We show that in Japan this was not the case and that so far local governments do participate in the stabilisation efforts of the central government. In a second step we show the institutional arrangements that have enabled the central government to influence the fiscal behaviour of the local governments accordingly. Will recent regulatory changes and the enourmous debt level have a significant impact? We argue that although from April 2000 some legal changes in the direction of decentralisation were enforced, many influence mechanisms remained intact and thus the changes weaken the established system, but did not break it up altogether.

Suggested Citation

  • Pascha, Werner & Robaschik, Frank, 2001. "The role of Japanese local governments in stabilisation policy," Working Papers on East Asian Studies 40/2001, University of Duisburg-Essen, Institute of East Asian Studies IN-EAST.
  • Handle: RePEc:zbw:udedao:402001
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/40994/1/333900553.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Pascha, Werner, 2002. "Wirtschaftspolitische Reformen in Japan: Kultur als Hemmschuh?," Working Papers on East Asian Studies 44/2002, University of Duisburg-Essen, Institute of East Asian Studies IN-EAST.
    2. Miyazaki, Tomomi, 2013. "Fiscal Policy and Regional Business Cycle Fluctuations in Japan," Discussion Paper Series 583, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:udedao:402001. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/fwessde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.