Highly readable yet deeply researched, this book serves as an essential guide to the many ways in which Japan has risen to become one of the world's most creative and innovative societies.

• Challenges conventional views of Japan as mired in two unproductive "lost decades" by documenting the myriad ways in which the nation has embraced creativity and innovation

• Describes the ways in which Japan has transformed our lives and explains the guiding principles of one of the world's least understood, most vibrantly creative societies

Given that much of the global leadership in value creation over the past couple of decades has been driven by the Silicon Valley model – not only a geographic region but a distinct ecosystem of complementary characteristics – the basic question this paper asks is how far Japan’s Abenomics reforms are pushing Japan towards being able to compete in an era dominated by Silicon Valley firms. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming one of the underlying drivers of the next wave of industrial transformations. There is every reason to believe that we are on the cusp of a sea change in how human activities and decision-making are transformed by abundant computing power. This research note will provide the basis for understanding the conceptual building blocks and paradigmatic examples of how the development of AI is accelerating, and how its deployment will be transformative. 

Using a unique dataset on all major corporate restructuring events in Japan between 1981 and 2010, we assess changes in the role of the main bank in guiding corporate turarounds, and the economic consequences of these changes for distressed firms. We identify firms in distress among all listed firms based on accounting data, and we separately identify firms undergoing corporate restructuring based on a newspaper search for the Japanese term “saiken”.

This paper examines how the spatial distribution of economic activity evolved within North Korea during a period of economic sanctions. Countries have used economic sanctions to isolate North Korea from the benefits of international trade and finance. China, however, has not imposed the sanctions, and consequentially has offset the trade restrictions imposed by other countries.

This paper examines the impact of government guaranteed small business loans on regional growth. I construct a metro-level panel of the Small Business Administration's guaranteed loans and examine economic growth between 1993 and 2002, across 316 metro areas in the US. A simple OLS regression finds a significant positive relationship between small business loans and regional growth. However, first-difference and instrumental variable regressions that mitigate endogeneity find no significant employment or income growth effects from small business loans.

The development community has increased its focus on higher education over the past two decades, recognizing that education can contribute to building up a country’s capacity for participation in an increasingly knowledge-based world economy and accelerate economic growth. The value added by higher education to economies—job creation, innovation, enhanced entrepreneurship, and research, a core higher education activity—has been highlighted by an important body of literature. 

Peace on a Knife’s Edge is the translation of Lee Jong-Seok's 2014 memoir of South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun's efforts to bring peace to the Korean Peninsula in the face of opposition at home from conservative forces and abroad from the Bush administration’s hard stances of “tailored containment” and its declaration of the North as part of the “axis of evil.”

Abstract

Abstract
Substance abuse has been an important social and public health problem in Thailand for decades. The National Household Survey on Substance and Alcohol Use in Thailand, which has been conducted six times, shows that substance abuse has steadily increased.

Japan is known to have an exceptionally low level of inward foreign direct investment (FDI). The promotion of inward FDI is one of the policy goals of Abenomics structural reforms. This present paper studies the accumulation of Japan's inward FDI stock during the first 3 years of Abenomics (2012–2015), and finds no evidence that Japan's inward FDI stock increased more than the trend before Abenomics started would have predicted.

Part of an eighteen-month Academy project on Civil Wars, Violence, and International Responses, the essays

Abstract

Despite recent reductions in prevalence, China still faces a substantial tuberculosis (TB) burden, with future progress dependent on the ability of rural providers to appropriately detect and refer TB patients for further care.

In this book, Gi-Wook Shin shares his observations on and provides recommendations for social maladies currently affecting Korean society.

Health insurance holds the promise of improving population health and survival and protecting people from catastrophic health spending. Yet evidence from lower- and middle-income countries on the impact of health insurance is limited. We investigated whether insurance expansion reduced adult mortality in rural China, taking advantage of differences across Chinese counties in the timing of the introduction of the New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS).

The future of ASEAN is necessarily unknown. Its futures, however, can be guessed with less risk of being wrong. The purpose of this article is not to predict with confidence but to "pandict" with reticence—not to choose one assured future but to scan several that could conceivably occur. Also, what follows is merely a range of possible futures, not the range. The five different ASEANs of the future all too briefly sketched below are meant to be suggestive, but they are neither fully exclusive nor jointly exhaustive. Potentiality outruns imagination.

Objective To investigate the situation of parenting behavior and related risk factors in infants aged 18~30 months from rural areas of southern Shaanxi Province. Methods A total of 1,243 infants and their families from rural areas of southern Shaanxi Province, China. A multivariate regression analysis and T-test were performed to determine the risk factors for the parenting behavior in caregivers. Results 1) The mother was the primary caregiver for 67.34% of the children in the sample.

Abstract

The future of ASEAN is necessarily unknown. Its futures, however, can be guessed with less risk of being wrong. My purpose here is not to predict with confidence but to “pandict” with reticence—not to choose one assured future but to scan several that could conceivably occur. Also, what follows is merely a range, not the range.  The five different ASEANs of the future all too briefly sketched below are meant to be suggestive, but they are neither fully exclusive nor jointly exhaustive. Potentiality outruns imagination.

Rising powers often seek to reshape the world order, triggering confrontations with those who seek to defend the status quo. In recent years, as international institutions have grown in prevalence and influence, they have increasingly become central arenas for international contestation. Phillip Y. Lipscy examines how international institutions evolve as countries seek to renegotiate the international order. He offers a new theory of institutional change and explains why some institutions change flexibly while others successfully resist or fall to the wayside.

This is a chapter in the second edition of The National Security Enterprise, a book edited by Roger Z. George and Harvey Rishikof that provides practitioners' insights into the operation, missions, and organizational cultures of the principal national security agencies and other institutions that shape the U.S. national security decision-making process.

The same institutions that enabled China’s massive urbanization and spurred its economic growth now require further reform and innovation.