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The Role of the Government in Facilitating TFP Growth during Japan’s Rapid-growth Era

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Community, Market and State in Development

Abstract

It is widely known that Japan experienced rapid economic growth in the late 1950s and 1960s, when per capita gross domestic product grew at a remarkable rate of over 10 percent (Figure 4.1). There are numerous books and academic papers written on the reasons behind this success of the postwar Japanese economy. Some studies rely on descriptive macro-level statistics (Inada et al., 1993; Kosai and Kaminski, 1986; Minami, 1994; Nakamura, 1995; Ohkawa and Rosovsky, 1973) and others employ the growth-accounting framework to decompose the high-growth rate into different factors (Denison and Chung, 1976; Hayami and Ogasawara, 1999, 2002; Yasuba, 2002; Young, 1995). More recent works on the Japanese economy rely on modern calibration techniques to replicate the postwar rapid growth (Braun et al., 2006; Braun et al., 2009; Chen et al., 2006; Otsu, 2007; Parente and Prescott, 2004).

This paper has been prepared for the Festschrift Conference for Yujiro Hayam on State, Community, and Market in Development, February 27–28, 2009. We would like to thank Tina David, Yoshihisa Godo, Jikun Huang, Kaliappa Kalirajan, Keijiro Otsuka, Gustav Ranis, Scott Rozelle, Tetsushi Sonobe, John Strauss, and other participants for helpful comments.

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Authors
  1. Shuhei Aoki
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  2. Julen Esteban-Pretel
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  3. Tetsuji Okazaki
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  4. Yasuyuki Sawada
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Keijiro Otsuka Kaliappa Kalirajan

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© 2010 Shuhei Aoki, Julen Esteban-Pretel, Tetsuji Okazaki, and Yasuyuki Sawada

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Aoki, S., Esteban-Pretel, J., Okazaki, T., Sawada, Y. (2010). The Role of the Government in Facilitating TFP Growth during Japan’s Rapid-growth Era. In: Otsuka, K., Kalirajan, K. (eds) Community, Market and State in Development. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230295018_4

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