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Abstract

The role of labour market institutions, wage determination and economic development in Japan is an interesting case. After World War II, as the very first of the ‘Asian miracle’ countries, Japan rapidly caught up with the living standard of the most developed countries in the world. However, since the early 1990s the country has suffered from a less dynamic economy, with stagnation and even deflation. The ‘Japanese disease’, as this deflationary development over the last decades has been called, depends very much on wage developments and the failure to prevent falling wage costs. In this contribution, labour market institutions and wage development in Japan and their negative effects on economic performance are at the centre of the analysis.

For valuable comments and discussion, I thank Maarten van Klaveren.

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© 2015 Hansjörg Herr

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Herr, H. (2015). Japan. In: van Klaveren, M., Gregory, D., Schulten, T. (eds) Minimum Wages, Collective Bargaining and Economic Development in Asia and Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137512420_5

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