 Time-Varying NAIRU and Potential Growth in JapanYasuo Hirose and Koichiro Kamada Bank of Japan Working Paper Series from Bank of Japan Abstract: This paper demonstrates the time-varying NAIRU approach for estimation of the potential rate of growth, where the latter is defined as the growth rate at which the inflation rate would be neither accelerating nor decelerating. We show theoretically that this inflation-neutral potential rate of growth is determined by three factors: the rate of technological progress, the growth rates of the production factors, and the shift in the NAIRU. We conduct empirical analysis for Japan since the latter half of the 1980s and show that all three factors have contributed to the lowering of the Japanese potential rate of growth since the early 1990s. In particular, we discover that it was the shift in the NAIRU that caused the protracted period of slowdown in Japanese potential growth around the midst of the 1990s. Furthermore, we show that since 2000, with the strengthening of East Asian international competitiveness, Japan has been driven to substantial reform of its old economic structure, and this may have brought about an acceleration of the shift in the NAIRU. We also point out that the NAIRU estimate and its relationship with the inflation rate are subject to various kinds of uncertainty, and thus care should be taken in their evaluation and interpretation. Keywords: output gap; potential growth; NAIRU (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:boj:bojwps:02-e-8r Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Bank of Japan Working Paper Series from Bank of Japan Contact information at EDIRC. |
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