Despite recent improvements in female labor force participation, women remain underrepresented in STEM fields in Japan. Given the close link between STEM workers and innovation, encouraging women to pursue STEM careers could boost growth potential. Using a calibrated endogenous growth model with STEM talent, this paper quantifies the potential gains from eliminating barriers to STEM fields among women. The findings suggest that bridging the gender gap in STEM fields can boost TFP growth by 20 percent and consumption-equivalent welfare by 4 percent in Japan.

It gives me great pleasure to review this important book. I recommend it highly to any physicist with an interest or curiosity about this economy thing within which we operate. . . There is no excuse not to get this invaluable volume onto your bookshelf. Simon Roberts, Institute of Physics Energy Group This book addresses a very important topic, namely economic growth analysis from the angle of energy and material flows. The treatment is well balanced in terms of research and interpretation of the broader literature. The book not only contains a variety of empirical indicators, statistical analyses and insights, but also offers an unusually complete and pluralistic view on theorizing about economic growth and technological change. This results in a number of refreshing perspectives on known ideas and literatures. The text is so attractively written that I found it very difficult to stop reading. All in all, this is a very original and important contribution to the everlasting debate on growth versus environment. Jeroen C.J.M. van den Bergh, University of Barcelona, Spain and Free University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Would you want your great-grandchildren in 2100AD to have a 22nd-century industrial economy? If so, read this book to grasp how strongly wealth depends on energy and its efficient use. Start treating fossil energy not as continuing income, but as one-time energy capital to spend on efficiency and long-term sustainable energy production. Otherwise, your descendants will inherit a broken 20th-century economy that only worked with cheap fossil fuels. They will not be rich and they will wonder what their ancestors were thinking. John R. Mashey, PhD, former Chief Scientist, Silicon Graphics Current economic theory attributes most income growth to technical progress. However, since technical progress can neither be defined nor measured, no one really knows what policies will encourage income growth. Ayres and Warr show that access to useful work, which can be defined and measured, explain the bulk of post-1900 income changes in Japan, Britain and the USA. They see rising real prices for fossil fuel and stagnating efficiencies of converting raw energy into useful work as a threat to continued income growth. This brilliant and original work has profound policy implications for future income growth without significant improvements in energy conversion efficiency. Thomas Casten, Chairman, Recycled Energy Development LLC Following the up-and-down energy shock of 2008, Ayres and Warr offer a unique analysis critical to our economic future. They argue that useful work produced by energy and energy services is far more important to overall GDP growth than conventional economic theory assumes. Their new theory, based on extensive empirical and theoretical analysis, has important implications for economists, businessmen and policymakers for anybody concerned with our economic future. Ayres and Warr argue persuasively that economic growth is not only endogenous but has been driven for the past two centuries largely by the declining effective cost of energy. If their new theory is correct, the inevitable future rise of the real cost of energy (beyond the $147 oil price peak in July 2008), could halt economic growth in the US and other advanced countries unless we dramatically improve energy with technology. J. Paul Horne, independent international market economist The historic link between output (GDP) growth and employment has weakened. Since there is no quantitively verifiable economic theory to explain past growth, this unique book explores the fundamental relationship between thermodynamics (physical work) and economics. The authors take a realistic approach to explaining the relationship between technological progress, thermodynamic efficiency and economic growth. Their findings are a step toward the integration of neo-classical and evolutionary perspectives on endogenous economic growth, concluding in a fundam

Japan: Selected Issues

This volume is a report by leading international economic experts on China's economic priorities in the coming years. From various aspects of the domestic and foreign situation, China has now reached a critical juncture in its economic development. Unless China is able to overcome the difficulties in undertaking further reforms in the next ten years, China would be caught in the middle-income trap and be unable to become a modern country. The future course of China's economic development is also of great concern to the rest of the world because the socio-political-economic conditions in China will have significant impact on global economic prosperity and on global political harmony.The book is a product of close collaboration between the School of Economics at Fudan University and the Earth Institute at Columbia University. They cover a new paradigm for growth, short-term demand management, institutional reforms for middle-term growth, and strengthening the fundamentals for long-term growth.

How well are European firms responding to the new opportunities for growth, and in which global value chains are they developing these new activities? The policy discussion on the future of manufacturing requires an understanding of the changing role of manufacturing in Europe's growth agenda.

A Washington Post Bestseller Three Principles for Managing—and Avoiding—the Problems of Growth Why is profitable growth so hard to achieve and sustain? Most executives manage their companies as if the solution to that problem lies in the external environment: find an attractive market, formulate the right strategy, win new customers. But when Bain & Company’s Chris Zook and James Allen, authors of the bestselling Profit from the Core, researched this question, they found that when companies fail to achieve their growth targets, 90 percent of the time the root causes are internal, not external—increasing distance from the front lines, loss of accountability, proliferating processes and bureaucracy, to name only a few. What’s more, companies experience a set of predictable internal crises, at predictable stages, as they grow. Even for healthy companies, these crises, if not managed properly, stifle the ability to grow further—and can actively lead to decline. The key insight from Zook and Allen’s research is that managing these choke points requires a “founder’s mentality”—behaviors typically embodied by a bold, ambitious founder—to restore speed, focus, and connection to customers: • An insurgent’s clear mission and purpose • An unambiguous owner mindset • A relentless obsession with the front line Based on the authors’ decade-long study of companies in more than forty countries, The Founder’s Mentality demonstrates the strong relationship between these three traits in companies of all kinds—not just start-ups—and their ability to sustain performance. Through rich analysis and inspiring examples, this book shows how any leader—not only a founder—can instill and leverage a founder’s mentality throughout their organization and find lasting, profitable growth.

This book focuses on exploring the relationship between spin-outs from incumbents and the patterns of innovation in general purpose technology. Do spin-outs really promote innovation? What happens if star scientists leave the incumbents and establish a startup to target untapped markets? Entrepreneurial spin-outs have been recognized as an engine of innovation. General purpose technology, such as the steam engine in the Industrial Revolution, has been considered an engine of growth. This book provides new perspectives on how entrepreneurial spin-outs shape the patterns of innovation in general purpose technology by integrating theoretical findings in industrial organizations and includes innovation studies and detailed evidence from a longitudinal case study. Concretely, by longitudinally exploring the technological development of laser diodes in the USA and Japan, this study examines how the existence or absence of an entrepreneurial strategic choice for spin-outs influences the patterns of subsequent technological development. The longitudinal analysis in this book shows that spin-outs could hinder the subsequent development of existing technology when that technology is still at a nascent level, because the cumulative effects of technological development could disappear if research and development personnel leave their parent firms in order to target different sub-markets. The findings of this book show that institutional settings designed to promote spin-outs do not necessarily promote innovation. The book offers novel theoretical insights into the relationship between institutions promoting spin-outs and the developments of general purpose technology.

This open access book provides a readable narrative of the bubbles and the banking crisis Japan experienced during the two decades between the late 1980s and the early 2000s. Japan, which was a leading competitor in the world’s manufacturing sector, tried to transform itself into an economy with domestic demand-led mature growth, but the ensuing bubbles and crisis instead made the country suffer from chronicle deflation and stagnation. The book analyses why the Japanese authorities could not avoid making choices that led to this outcome. The chapters are based on the lectures to regulators from emerging economies delivered at the Global Financial Partnership Center of the Financial Services Agency of Japan.

Japan grew explosively and consistently for more than a century, from the Meiji Restoration until the collapse of the economic bubble in the early 1990s. Since then, it has been unable to restart its economic engine and respond to globalization. How could the same political–economic system produce such strongly contrasting outcomes? This book identifies the crucial variables as classic Japanese forms of socio-political organization: the "circles of compensation." These cooperative groupings of economic, political, and bureaucratic interests dictate corporate and individual responses to such critical issues as investment and innovation; at the micro level, they explain why individuals can be decidedly cautious on their own, yet prone to risk-taking as a collective. Kent E. Calder examines how these circles operate in seven concrete areas, from food supply to consumer electronics, and deals in special detail with the influence of Japan's changing financial system. The result is a comprehensive overview of Japan's circles of compensation as they stand today, and a road map for broadening them in the future.

This book provides readers with a systematic approach to quantitative investments and bridges the gap between theory and practice, equipping students to more seamlessly enter the world of industry. A successful quantitative investment strategy requires an individual to possess a deep understanding of the financial markets, investment theories and econometric modelings, as well as the ability to program and analyze real-world data sets. In order to connect finance theories and practical industry experience, each chapter begins with a real-world finance case study. The rest of the chapter introduces fundamental insights and theories, and teaches readers to use statistical models and R programming to analyze real-world data, therefore grounding the learning process in application. Additionally, each chapter profiles significant figures in investment and quantitative studies, so that readers can more fully understand the history of the discipline. This volume will be particularly useful to advanced students and practitioners in finance and investments.