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Seminar
For almost a decade since 2004, we have been hosting a seminar series at least twice a month usually second and fourth Friday afternoons (16:30-18:00). It is called as “Waseda Friday Seminar.” We invited mainly young but sometime established domestic and international researchers of economics and related fields. On rare occasions, we hosted seminars on history, mathematics, and commerce and international laws. The Waseda Friday Seminar is going to ensure all the participating members to share the latest information of the research frontier.
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There are three unique features of the financial system in the FSM. First, the Rai Stone in the island of Yap, John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman defined as origin of credit currency, has been used as betrothal money and money for conflict arbitration. Economists pay special attention to this stone money because it leads to the concept of virtual currency in contemporary economic research (N.Narula (2016)). We have a special interest in the reason why no stone money exists in the other states of FSM.
Second, in spite of no reference in the past literature, we found clues of the existence of a mutual loan system in the Pohnpei island (locally called as MUSIN) on our visit (March 2018). We are told that MUSIN is originated from MUJIN, a Japanese ROSCA (Rotating Savings and Credit Association), which may have started in the Japanese colonization era. We are going to search on where and how MUJIN was born in the FSM, and to study what kind of effects it has on the FSM economy.
Third, domestic or national currency is not circulated in all the Micronesian countries (FSM, Marshall Islands, and Palau) without their own central banks. They are rare examples of the fully dollarized countries. They officially use the US dollar as their fiat money while the US officially permits its use as their fiat money there. This might be partly because they were trust territories of the US when they became independent, and partly because their population sizes are minimal. We would like to study how this influence on the economic growth of FSM.
We are going to invite speakers at our seminars, lectures, workshops, and forums for our members as well as those interested in the above and related problems in Micronesia.
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