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The Plan to Accept 300,000 International Students achieved its numerical target in 2019 in Japan. Although the Japanese government announced its successful attainment, there has been criticism that it increased bogus international students. This chapter aims to elucidate its outcomes and issues by examining its policy structure, key indicators, and the background causes of such criticism. The Plan was supposed to recruit excellent international students and promote their employment in Japan, pursuing an increase in highly skilled professionals, the objectives listed in the Growth Strategy of the Abe administration (2012–2020). As a result of the analysis, it was found that the efforts for internationalization of universities led to the increase in international students in English-taught degree programs (ETDP), especially at the graduate level. However, many of them found difficulty finding employment in Japan because of lack of the Japanese language proficiency required by Japanese companies. The main contributors in achieving the target of 300,000 international students were Japanese language schools. Since their student recruitment and educational activities have not been monitored enough by the government, it led to the increase of international students who were busy with part-time jobs and failed to proceed to universities, which undermined the Plan’s attainment.

This paper aims to test the hedging ability of housing investment against inflation in Japan and the USA during the period 2000–2020.

This study applies the deep learning method and The exponential general autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity in mean (1, 1) model with breaks.

Within the asymmetric framework, it is found that housing returns (HR) can hedge against inflation in both these markets, which mentions that when investing in the housing market in Japan and the USA, investors are compensated for bearing from inflation. This result is consistent with Fisher’s hypothesis. Especially, the empirical results show that the risk-return tradeoff is available in Japan’s housing market and not available in the US housing market. Any signal of a high inflation rate – referred to as “bad news” – may cause a drop in HR in Japan and a raise in the USA.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is one of the first studies using the deep learning method (long short-term memory model) to estimate the expected/unexpected inflation rates.

The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16 outlines sustainability as associated with peace, good governance and justice. The perception of international tourists about security measures and risks is a key factor affecting destination choices, tourist flow and overall satisfaction. Thus, we investigate the impact of armed forces personnel, prices, economic stability, financial development and infrastructure on tourism.

This research used data from 130 countries from 1995 to 2019, which were divided into four income groups. This study employs a two-step generalized method of moments (GMM) technique and a novel tourism index comprising five relevant indicators of tourism.

A 1% increase in armed forces personnel expands tourism in all income groups – 0.369% High Income Countries (HICs), 0.348% Upper Middle Income Countries (UMICs), 0.247% Lower Middle Income Countries (LMICs) and 0.139% Low Income Countries (LICs). The size of the tourism-safety coefficient decreases from high to low-income groups. The impact of inflation is significantly negative in all panels, excluding LICs. The reduction in tourism was 0.033% in HICs, 0.049% in UMICs and 0.029% in LMICs for a 1% increase in prices. The increase in the global tourism index is more in LICs (0.055%), followed by LMICs (0.024%), UMICs (0.009%) and HICs (0.004%) for a 1% expansion in the gross domestic product (GDP)/capita growth. However, the magnitude of the growth-led tourism impact is greater in developing countries. A positive impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflow was found in all panels like 0.016% in HICs, 0.050% in UMICs and 0.119% in LMICs for a 1% increase in FDI inflow. The rise in the global tourism index is 0.097% (HICs), 0.124% (UMICs) and 0.310% (LMICs) for a 1% rise in the financial development index. The increase in the global tourism index is 0.487% (HICs), 0.420% (UMICs) and 0.136% (LICs) for a 1% rise in the infrastructure index.

Empirical analysis infers important policy implications such as (a) establishment of a peaceful environment via recruitment of security personnel, use of safe city cameras, modern technology and law enforcement; (b) provision of basic facilities to tourists like sanitation, drinking water, electricity, accommodation, quality food, fuel and communication network and (c) price stability through different tools of monetary and fiscal policy.

First, it explains the effect of security personnel on a comprehensive index of tourism instead of a single variable of tourism. Second, it captures the importance of economic stability (i.e., economic growth, financial development and FDI inflow) in the tourism–peace nexus.