Word: economisters
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...study by scholars at Stanford and the University of Chicago challenges the assumption that corporate special interests wield substantial influence over policy. Stanford Business School economist Timothy Groseclose and his co-researchers analyzed the 1998 election cycle and found that less than 10 percent of total campaign contributions came from corporate political action committees. Examining corporate lobbying expenditures, the researchers found that in 1998, corporations donated six times as much to charities as they spent on lobbying...
...this has prompted a host of foreign and domestic observers to conclude?as many have during every uptick since the early 1990s?that Japan's decisive economic turnaround has finally begun. Merrill Lynch's chief Japan economist, Jesper Koll, has gone so far as to declare in the Daily Yomiuri newspaper that the economy has reached an "inflection point." "Make no mistake," he asserts. "Japan is back...
...Take that spectacular 3.9% annualized second-quarter growth rate. In a pair of reports entitled The Paradox of Deflation and The Paradox of Deflation Solved, HSBC Securities senior economist Peter Morgan concludes that Japan's gross-domestic-product figures are increasingly skewed by discrepancies in how price changes for different types of goods (particularly computers and other information-technology products) are calculated, thereby creating significant distortions. "This suggests that official GDP data are substantially overstating economic growth," he writes. Morgan's own second-quarter GDP-growth estimate is just 2.1%. "Things may not have been as bad as everybody thought...
...doubt making progress on some structural-reform initiatives and investors are enjoying a respite from gloom and doom, many doubt whether all the ingredients are in place for a genuine, lasting recovery. "The weakness in the preceding year was hard to explain," says Richard Jerram, chief economist at ING in Tokyo, "but a lot of people are trying to make this [rally] into something it isn't." Scratch beneath the surface on some of the headline-making numbers and Japan's mini-miracle quickly starts to look a bit contrived?many of those who have scrutinized the government's economic...
...That Japan must play this currency game at all suggests that the country's economy is still in disarray and that the growth a weak-yen policy has helped to produce does not provide the foundation of a lasting revival. As economist Richard Katz writes in a recent issue of his newsletter, the Oriental Economist, "If Japan's economy were basically healthy, then most of the recent economic indicators would justifiably be taken as the classic signs of an economy in recovery." But Japan's economy is not basically healthy, he argues, at least not yet. Although there have been...