Britain has a partly decentralised arrangement where most official statistics are produced in government departments at the direction of ministers. A parallel set of centralised statistical institutions and organisations has grown up over time, culminating in the 2007 legislative reforms instituting a formally independent central statistical authority. Chapter 6 traces the different credibility imperatives bearing on UK official statistics and shows how these produced demands for centralisation, legislation, and independencewith attention to the political fallout from the Thatcher Government’s defunding of and interference in official statistics, along with subsequent efforts to find arrangements enhancing statistical independence while preserving the decentralised model. The chapter illustrates impacts of UK government statisticians’ behaviours, highlighting problems in the management of the central statistical agency, and conflicts between statisticians over reform. It shows that the distribution of statistical authority in the UK reflects efforts to reconcile post-Thatcher depoliticisation with a decentralised arrangement and Westminster conventions of ministerial prerogative.

This introduction sets the context for my study of the governance of official statistical agencies in Australia, Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom and United States of America. It presents the theoretical framework used in the study, based on dramaturgical sociology. The research approach is discussed, including the selection of case study countries, the use of in-depth interviews and the dramaturgical approach to data analysis. An overview of the argument of the book is provided along with a summary of the remaining chapters.

The government of Shinzo Abe represents an important turning point in Japanese politics and political economy. Abe became the longest-serving prime minister in Japanese history, and his government enacted important reforms under the banner of “Abenomics.” In this introductory chapter, we provide a broad review of the Abe government and its policies and point out several apparent puzzles to motivate the volume. We argue that the Abe government is the clearest manifestation of a new Japanese political system that represents a full transition away from the 1955 system. The new system is characterized by a strong prime minister with centralized authority, careful management of the prime minister’s popularity, and a focus on policies with broad, popular appeal. Abe utilized and strengthened Japan’s new political institutions to implement significant policy changes across a wide range of issue areas, including monetary and fiscal policy, the labor market, corporate governance, agricultural reforms, and national security.

Abenomics, the package of economic policies adopted by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe since 2013, is commonly credited with bringing the Japanese economy out of deflation and two decades of stagnant growth. Abenomics consists of three arrows: the aggressive monetary policy; the flexible fiscal policy; and structural reforms for growth. The "third arrow" of Abenomics consists of wide-ranging deregulation and promotion in various sector to raise productivity. Conventional wisdom is that the third arrow of Abenomics started in 2013, along with the first and second arrows. This paper argues that many of ideas and implementations that are credited to the third arrow of 2013 originated in the discussion and decision of the first Abe administration of 2006–2007, followed by the Fukuda administration of 2007–2008. The prime minister’s Council of Economic and Fiscal Policy (CEFP) played the key role in the 2006–2008 reform efforts. It took more than five years for the reform efforts and decisions made in 2006–2008 to bear fruit.

Corporate governance reform was one of the central issues in the “third arrow” of the Abe administration’s economic revival program. The Japanese Stewardship Code was introduced in 2014, followed by the Corporate Governance Code in 2015. This chapter quantifies how the reform changed the corporate governance of Japanese firms. Firstly, we examine the changes in institutional ownership, cross-holdings, and board structure following the reforms. Then we study whether changes in ownership structure and board structure affect the firm behavior and performance. We find that the introduction of the Stewardship Code is associated with more institutional ownership, especially in mid-sized firms. Firms with few outside directs increase the number of outside directors to follow the Corporate Governance Code. However, the increase in institutional ownership and outside directors do not promote risk-taking behavior and improve firm performance.

One of the most noteworthy facts about the government of Shinzo Abe is that, although his cabinet approval rating often dropped dramatically following controversial political decisions, it typically bounced back. In this chapter, I analyze Abe’s resurgent popularity based on a survey experiment which I conducted in late 2015 soon after the passage of national security legislation had caused the public support for his government to sink at its lowest level. The experiment successfully recaptured the occurrence of drops in the support for Abe government when respondents were primed informationally about the national security bill just passed. Further, cross-sectional analyses reveal that the drops occurred not amongst liberal/leftist respondents but rather among conservative respondents reacting perhaps to Abe’s overly aggressive manner in the legislative process. Precisely because their policy positions were closest to Abe himself, their withholding of support would not last long, thus elucidating the reason for Abe’s resurgent popularity.

The Abe administration had two goals with regard to historical legacy issues: to enrich national pride through historical revisionism; and to change the global narrative of Japan as perpetrator. Unfortunately, these goals were fundamentally incompatible. Further, they failed to take into account that public memorialization today is not only the purview of the state. It has democratized to include various domestic, transnational, and international actors. Through case studies of comfort women, Yasukuni Shrine, and Pearl Harbor, this chapter explores the degree of success for the Abe administration in achieving its goals in each of these areas and what the enduring challenges are that make these goals difficult to achieve.

This chapter explores the history of Japanese fiscal policy over the past two decades with the aim of better understanding where previous forecasts have erred. Japan provides an important case study of how a country facing intense fiscal pressures can avoid a hyperinflation or financial panic. We find that there were three key forces that likely improved Japan’s fiscal situation relative to more pessimistic predictions. First, the Japanese government has shown remarkable ability to hold down per capita expenditures on social pensions and healthcare. Second, the Japanese government has been able to raise taxes substantially. Third, the remarkable monetary policy pursued by the Bank of Japan has resulted in a dramatic decline in the amount of government bonds held by the private sector.

After 2012, Prime Minister Abe prioritized agricultural reform as a signature objective of the structural reform, or “third arrow,” component of Abenomics. But while the Abe reforms have enhanced competitive market signals in the farm sector and accelerated the long-term political decline of conservative LDP politicians, farm bureaucrats, and Japan Agricultural Cooperatives (JA) – the “farm lobby” – in the policy process, the lobby remains a significant obstacle to more sweeping change. To illustrate these points and the ongoing tug-of-war between neoliberal reformers and the farm lobby, this chapter explores some of the successes and failures of the government’s agricultural agenda against the backdrop of a deepening demographic and economic crisis in the countryside.