著者

牛嶋 俊一郎

出版者

埼玉大学経済学会

雑誌

社会科学論集 = SHAKAIKAGAKU-RONSHU (The Social Science Review) (ISSN:05597056)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.139, pp.1-18, 2013

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While over the past several decades the Okun's law has been applied to the Japanese economy in various ways, a few attempts had been made to create time series of potential output and GDP gap by utilizing the Okun's law. One reason behind this may be a seeming instability of the Okun's law coefficient in Japan. Furthermore there are many economics professors and researchers who regard the Okun's law as too volatile to get reliable evidence for analyzing important topics like GDP gap, potential output, and unemployment. However, the seeming instability of the Okun's coefficient can be removed by appropriately taking into account a change in potential growth and important structural changes during the estimation period. This paper aims at showing the usefulness of the Okun's law in the Japanese economy for analyzing price development and considering ways to overcome deflation by demonstrating how accurately can Okun's-lawbased GDP gap follow inflation/deflation development in the past 30 years.

著者

牛嶋 俊一郎

出版者

埼玉大学経済学会

雑誌

社会科学論集 = SHAKAIKAGAKU-RONSHU (The Social Science Review) (ISSN:05597056)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.133, pp.89-120, 2011

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In Japan, the GDP gap has been estimated by the production function. This approach reveals a long-term trend of Japanese economy, in which the GDP gap fluctuates within a narrow range, and shows the GDP gap does not closely correlate with price development. The aim of this paper is to estimate the GDP gap based on the Okun's law and show that deflation in Japan has a close relation with the GDP gap development in the long stagnation after the asset bubble burst. Unlike existing studies based on the Okun's law, this paper uses potential growth rates, a byproduct of the Okun's law coefficient instead of coefficient itself, to estimate the GDP gap due to the fact that the Okun's law coefficient is not stable over time in Japan and varies according to the estimation period. A new GDP gap estimation tested in this paper clearly shows that the Japanese economy has been suffered from a large GDP gap after the asset bubble burst and deflation is closely related to the GDP gap development.