Earlier this month the Japanese Prime Minister Suga announced that he is not going to seek re-election as leader of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and that he is ending his tenure as Prime Minister after only one year. Here, professor Takatoshi Ito, a former Japanese deputy vice minister of finance, writes about the LDP leadership race that will also determine who will be the next Prime Minister of Japan.

TOKYO – Last month, I <a title="Japan's Delta Desperation" href="https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/japan-general-election-suga-struggles-by-takatoshi-ito-2021-08" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wrote</a>, “Unless [Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide] Suga acts quickly, more lives will be lost, and his own political position may become yet another victim of the virus.” This has now come to pass.

Yoshihide Suga, Prime Minister of Japan, remotely addresses the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly in a pre-recorded message, Friday Sept. 24, 2021, at UN headquarters. He recently announced that he is not going to seek re-election as leader of the ruling LDP-party at the end of this month. Photo: Peter Foley/AP/TT

Takatoshi Ito on the LDP leadership race that will also determine who will be the next Prime Minister of Japan.

Japan’s Four-Horse Race

Earlier this month El Salvador became the first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. Jeffrey Frankel, Professor of Capital Formation and Growth at Harvard University, is critical of the experiment.

CAMBRIDGE – El Salvador this month became the first country to adopt a cryptocurrency – in this case, Bitcoin – as legal tender. I say the first, because others might follow. But they should think twice, because the idea is highly dubious – and likely to be economically dangerous for developing countries in particular.

Government employees wait for the opening of the Chivo digital wallet machine, which will exchange cash for Bitcoin cryptocurrency, at Las Americas Square in San Salvador, El Salvador, Tuesday, Sept. 7, 2021. Photo: Salvador Melendez/AP/TT

The Harvard professor Jeffrey Frankel on El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment.

El Salvador’s Bitcoin Folly

The World Bank has recently suspended its Doing Business report after it was revealed that the rankings therein had been <a title="Explainer: Why World Bank is under fire over set of rankings" href="https://bulletin.nu/explainer-why-world-bank-is-under-fire-over-set-of-rankings" target="_blank" rel="noopener">changed to make China look better</a>. Here, Kaushik Basu, a former chief economist of the World Bank, gives us an insider’s perspective on the Doing Business scandal.

ITHACA – Recent days have brought me a storm of emails and calls about the collapse of the World Bank’s most widely watched annual report, Doing Business (DB), which ranks countries by how easily and efficiently small businesses can operate in them. On September 16, the bank <a title="World Bank Group to Discontinue Doing Business Report " href="https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/statement/2021/09/16/world-bank-group-to-discontinue-doing-business-report" target="_blank" rel="noopener">announced</a> that it would discontinue the report after an <a title="https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/84a922cc9273b7b120d49ad3b9e9d3f9-0090012021/original/DB-Investigation-Findings-and-Report-to-the-Board-of-Executive-Directors-September-15-2021.pdf" href="https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/84a922cc9273b7b120d49ad3b9e9d3f9-0090012021/original/DB-Investigation-Findings-and-Report-to-the-Board-of-Executive-Directors-September-15-2021.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">independent investigation</a> by the law firm WilmerHale revealed the Bank’s <a title="How World Bank leaders put pressure on staff to alter a global index" href="https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/09/17/how-world-bank-leaders-put-pressure-on-staff-to-alter-a-global-index" target="_blank" rel="noopener">sordid efforts</a>, starting in 2017 (I left the Bank in 2016, I hasten to add), to manipulate data in order to improve China and Saudi Arabia’s DB rankings. The Bank had <a title="Doing Business – Data Irregularities Statement" href="https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/statement/2020/08/27/doing-business---data-irregularities-statement" target="_blank" rel="noopener">suspended publication</a> of the index last year, owing to “irregularities” in its data.

The World Bank building, Monday, April 5, 2021, in Washington. Photo: Andrew Harnik/AP/TT

Kaushik Basu, a former chief economist of the World Bank, gives us an insider’s perspective on the Doing Business scandal.

Is Doing Business Really Dead?

The emergence of China as a true global power is a hot topic in international relations. Here the Oxford professor Rana Mitter discusses the impact of the Japanese takeover of Manchuria in 1931 on current Chinese policy.

OXFORD – Ninety years ago, on September 18, 1931, a junior Japanese military officer detonated an explosive that had been carefully laid by a Japanese-owned railroad near the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang (then known in the West as Mukden). The blast did little damage, but that wasn’t the point. The Japanese blamed Chinese soldiers for the explosion, which they used as a pretext to capture Shenyang and occupy the entire territory, known as Manchuria.

A Chinese man looks at a display at the anti-Japanese memorial war Museum in Beijing, China Friday Dec. 2, 2005. Photo:AP/TT

Official Chinese doctrine establishes the 1931 Manchurian Incident as the beginning of WWII