Abstract
The Japanese economy has been in a slump since the 1990s. The growth rate of GDP in real terms has dropped from 4.6 percent in the 1980s to 1.2 percent in the 1990s to 0.6 percent in the first ten years of the twenty-first century. This decline is termed the Great Recession because the growth rate, while low, is not negative on average and so cannot be called a depression. What were the causes? One is that politics did not effectively respond to the symptoms. In the 1990s, Japanese politicians continued administering the same old medicine, that is, expansion of public works spending. The medicine, however, was not effective.
Financial support from the Nomura Foundation and the University of Niigata Prefecture is gratefully acknowledged.
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Notes
See Yutaka Harada, “Policy Issues Regarding the Japanese Economy—the Great Recession, Inequality, Budget Deficit and the Aging Population,” Japanese Journal of Political Science, 13: 2 (2012): 223–253. This section is a summary of the paper.
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© 2015 Takashi Inoguchi
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Harada, Y. (2015). Economics Takes Command. In: Inoguchi, T. (eds) Japanese and Russian Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137488459_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137488459_6
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