Japan’s investment in the domestic construction industry has fallen to less than half its peak in 1992. Given the country’s declining population, Japanese construction companies must go global to remain profitable. To what extent the Japanese government and Japanese companies can contribute to meeting the growing infrastructure needs in the region is unclear as Japanese companies have long been operating primarily in Japan. The Japanese government has in recent years passed a series of new laws that encourage private sector participation in financing, building and operating public infrastructure. Through involvement in such public projects, Japanese companies have developed the skills and technologies to build a variety of infrastructures that are resilient to natural disasters and adaptable to various geographical conditions and social and economic development. But the major challenge for Japanese companies is to transform their business model drastically from one that relies on the domestic market to one that contributes to the social and economic development of third countries.

Over the past decade, Ontario has seen a renewal in efforts to stimulate economic growth by investing in infrastructures. In this paper, we analyze the impact of public infrastructure investment on economic performance in this province. We use a multivariate dynamic time series methodological approach, based on the use of vector autoregressive models to estimate the elasticities and marginal products of six different types of public infrastructure assets on private investment, employment and output. We find that all types of public investment crowd in private investment while investment in highways, roads, and bridges crowds out employment. We also find that all types of public investment, with the exception of highways, roads and bridges, have a positive effect on output. The relatively large range of results estimated for the impact of each of the different public infrastructure types suggests that a targeted approach to the design of infrastructure investment policy is required. Infrastructure investment in transit systems and health facilities display the highest returns for output and the largest effects on employment and labor productivity. In terms of the nature of the empirical results presented here it would be important to highlight the fact that investments in health infrastructures as well as investments in education infrastructures are of great relevance. This is a pattern consistent with the mounting international evidence on the importance of human capital for long term economic performance.

We investigate the impact on intertemporal distribution caused by a change of policy from tax to deficit financing of public investment, using a simple theoretical framework which combines the one-period McGuire-Olson economy with the conventional long-run Solow economy. This theoretical framework provides a simple way to highlight some significant interdependencies between private and public investments as well as the negative impact of taxation on aggregate productivity, and to trace some possible transmission mechanisms between deficit financing policies and the long-run path of consumption per head. The main tentative (theoretical) result is that although under fairly acceptable assumptions the likely impact of a deficit financing policy is to benefit the present at the expense of the future, under equally acceptable assumptions concerning the possibility of an excessive macro private saving–investment propensity, and/or of a significant productivity loss due to the excess burden of taxation, the adverse intertemporal distributional impact of deficit financing might become negligible, or even disappear altogether.

This exploratory study aims to identify the main characteristics and relationships between artificial intelligence (AI) and broadband development in Asia and the Pacific. Broadband networks are the foundation and prerequisite for the development of AI. But what types of broadband networks would be conducive are not adequately discussed so far. Furthermore, in addition to broadband networks, other factors, such as income level, broadband quality, and investment, are expected to influence the uptake of AI in the region. The findings are synthesized into a set of policy recommendations at the end of the article, which highlights the need for regional cooperation through an initiative, such as the Asia-Pacific Information Superhighway (AP-IS).