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The major economies of East Asia, namely Japan and the Four Asian Tigers, have always prioritized the WTO-led multilateral trade liberalization over other trade arrangements primarily due to their unique economic structure with a high dependency on the world’s major markets such as the US. Along the same line, even the huge blow from the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997 only managed to trigger a few initiatives to aide East Asian regional integration while being led by different centering bodies, APEC and ASEAN. These dispersed efforts naturally resulted in no realistically significant achievements in the light of ‘integration’ until the present day. Under these circumstances, East Asia now faces a second opportunity to achieve its economic independence from the extra-regional influences via regionalization: the 2009 Global Credit Crunch. This paper hereupon critically reviews the actual progress and the likely impacts of the current global recession on the East Asian region.

This paper identifies the new economic force regenerating the East Asian economies in the post‐crisis era. Based on the convergence of five main economic indexes, it reclassifies the ten East Asian entities into four tiers, and highlights the language similarities among the tiers. It also discusses the inter‐ and intra‐regional economic dynamics, and the implications on further regional trade/investment, financial cooperation and monetary integration, such as a possible unifying Asian currency.

This paper aims to estimate electricity demand functions in Japan’s residential sector.

The authors use a partial adjustment model and empirically analyze regional residential electricity demand by using data on 47 Japanese prefectures.

The results reveal that the price elasticity of residential electricity demand during the analytical period (1990-2010) is remarkably different among prefectures, depending on the magnitude of floor space per household. In addition, this study finds that price elasticity is high compared with income elasticity, implying that residential electricity demand changes with rates. Furthermore, an analysis of factors influencing electricity demand in the residential sector shows that increasing electricity demand growth in each region can be attributable mainly to declining electricity rates and increasing number of households.

These results suggest that monitoring the electricity rates and the number of households is important for forecasting future residential electricity demand at region.

The study considers the impact of the number of households on overall electricity demand and identifies other factors contributing to growth in residential electricity demand. The findings can be used to derive projections for future electricity demand.

Japanese regional banks have actively expanded their overseas business in emerging markets, and this topic is quite important for regional banks that have confronted severe business environments over the decades. An aging population suppresses long-term increases in loan demands, and stagnant economic conditions lead to lowered interest rates in the medium-term. Overseas business is a promising business field for regional banks, but recent developments have not been investigated in detail.

This chapter examines overseas investments using data from regional banks’ financial reports. Our sample comprises 44 regional banks without overseas branches, and a research period from FY2011 to FY2015. We demonstrate different overseas business patterns among regional banks. This investigation uses X-means clustering, which is nonhierarchical, as this method automatically presents an optimal number of clusters, and sorts regional banks into their appropriate clusters.

The X-means clustering method indicates five business patterns among regional banks. This also characterizes respective clusters and demonstrates that medium-sized banks actively develop security investments, which increases overseas business’s contributions to profits. Meanwhile, small banks cannot expand overseas investments, which differ from other banks. These banks must seek other business models to compensate for this decline in their earning power.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate/explore the possibilities of nationwide networked electronic theses in Japan.

The main points of the revised degree regulations, the activities of related organizations corresponding to the revised degree regulations, and the future direction of networked electronic theses which can be realized due to the network of institutional repositories are described and explained.

In Japan, following the revision of the degree regulations, nationwide electronic thesis networks will be formed, which are rarely observed in other countries, and an infrastructure will be constructed, by which institutional repositories in Japan can be harvested by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations. A well-established community of institutional repositories has enabled this achievement to take place.

Very few national laws and regulations oblige a person who has been conferred a doctorate to publicize the thesis through the internet. There are only a few countries where the standard for metadata was established and metadata harvesting using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting is being performed, providing one-stop services through portal sites. Therefore, this case study on the possibilities of nationwide networked electronic theses attributable to policies and the innovations of the repository network in Japan can provide useful information not only for persons in charge of digitizing dissertations but also for those concerned about open access generally.

Exports help developing countries to expand their production, promote industrialization and accelerate their economic growth. They played an important part in the economic transformation of Southeast Asian countries. The Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) is one of the ways in which developing countries can increase their exports to the markets of developed nations. The GSP, a unilateral, non‐reciprocal program agreed under the United Nations provides preferential duty entry to numerous products imported into developed countries by eligible developing countries. The objective of this study is to examine the role of GSP in stimulating exports of developing countries. It also provides a comparative appraisal of the GSP schemes of the United States and Japan. The paper also makes certain recommendations to make GSP schemes more efficient and applicable to particular situations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the transportation organizational service provision and travel behavioral responses after the March 2011 disaster in North East Japan. This research aims to identify the areas for capacity building in transportation to support resilient built environments.

A case study approach was taken to examine the transportation organizational service provision in one of the most devastated communities after the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Data on post-disaster transportation arrangements were collected from local newspapers, desk reviews of reports by transportation operators and the local council, semi-structured interviews with local council and community groups, and a residents’ questionnaire surveying travel behavior. Organizational responses were analyzed by: the pre-disaster phase, the emergency phase, the rebuilding (temporary settlement) phase and the recovery (permanent settlement) phase.

Transportation demand changes dramatically in the emergency phase. In the re-building phase, an efficient and effective provision of a transportation service is required. The recovery and pre-disaster phases are critical as these are the time to build capacity for resilience. Practical application of the land use and transportation planning process is recommended in forming a transportation master plan.

This research is the first attempt to analyze the transportation organizational responses after a disaster in four discrete temporal dimensions. The knowledge provided in the paper is derived from the examination of the transportation responses in a city after a major disaster. The findings are more generally applicable to any built environments that are aiming for resilience.

The provision of air transport services in small and regional airports is a major concern worldwide as regional aviation is challenged with inadequate revenues. This chapter aims to identify the driving factors for sustaining regional airlines and airports. Nine factors are identified through literature review and expert opinion. Fuzzy-total interpretive structural modeling is used to develop a hierarchical relationship among the factors. Truncated population of the region, national subsidies, and airport infrastructure development have been found to be the strongest drivers for promoting regional airports. This hierarchical model provides a logical structure to the factors.

During recent years, the long-run relationship between the unemployment rate (UR) and the labor force participation (LFP) rate has been examined in-depth in developed and developing economies. This paper aims to explore this relationship for Iranian women in 31 provinces from 2005Q2 to 2019Q1.

To examine the existence of a long-run relationship between female LFP and UR, the time-series cointegration approach has been used. Furthermore, regarding the low power of the univariate cointegration approach, the authors consider a panel version of the cointegration tests developed by Westerlund.

Both time-series cointegration tests and panel cointegration test support the unemployment invariance hypothesis for most Iranian provinces, especially the most religious ones. As it implies an invariance to supply side policies, it seems that reducing legal and cultural barriers could be more relevant to decrease female UR and increase LFP than training programs or R&D policies. The present results also suggest that, for this group of regions, a more centralized policy design could be appropriate, instead of a regional one.

This study investigates whether the unemployment invariance hypothesis holds for Iran, which has not been analyzed before for the Iranian labor market. Moreover, the study adopts a regional approach, which takes into account the huge regional differences in Iran.

The purpose of this study is to examine the existence of discouraged worker effect hypothesis and unemployment invariance hypothesis in Africa, including its five regional groups. Specifically, the study tests the existence of co-integration between different categories of labour force participation and unemployment rate, total male and female labour force participation and the unemployment rate for age brackets 15–24, 15–64 and 15+, respectively.

The study uses the data of 52 countries in Africa which cover the period from 1991 to 2018. Three co-integration estimation techniques namely, the Kao co-integration test, Pedroni co-integration test and Westerlund co-integration test are used to validate the existence of co-integration between the labour force participation and unemployment rate. The dynamic ordinary least square is further used to explore the impact of the unemployment rate on labour force participation, while the pooled ordinary least squares (POLS) that accounts for individual country and time effects is employed for robustness check.

Except for Southern Africa, it is found that the discouraged worker effect hypothesis holds in Africa and the rest of its regions. This suggests that there is a long-run relationship between labour force participation rate and unemployment rate irrespective of age group and gender classifications. To some extent, the authors discover the existence of cross-sectional dependence in the panel. There is also an inverse relationship between labour force participation and the unemployment rate. This implies that when the unemployment rate is high, labour force participation tends to decline. The results are, however, sensitive to the choice of estimation method.

The study is limited to the examination of linear co-integration between labour force participation and the unemployment rate in Africa and its five regions. The future study can investigate the possibility of a nonlinear or an asymmetric relationship between labour for participation and the unemployment rate.

Thus, a policy framework that would generate employment creation is greatly required in Africa.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is a pioneer work that addresses the issue of co-integration between labour force participation and unemployment rate for Africa and its five regions taking into consideration gender and age brackets of labour force participation and unemployment.