Ansichtssache : Zum Zustand der japanischen Wirtschaft nach Doppelschlag und Dreifach-Katastrophe

Neither Struck by the British, nor the Dutch Diseases: The Japanese Economy Comes along Quite Healthy

We assess the state of the Japanese economy by taking a fresh analytic look into its public sector finance, its export performance, and its labor market. Our findings strongly indicate that the conventional wisdom of »lost decade(s)« stands in stark contrast to economic reality. First, the status of public sector finance is not nearly as bad as suggested by the commonly used indicators (public debt as a ratio of GDP), and there is considerable potential to improve public finances, with the recent VAT hike as a prominent example. Second, the Japanese economy has not only reduced its dependency on domestic demand by increasing its share of exports, it has also reduced its export dependency on the U.S., and therefore on U.S. domestic demand. Moreover, Japan is now one of the few industrialized countries that enjoy a trade surplus with China. Third, the Japanese economy has created 7.9 million more jobs than were to be expected if the 1985 labor force participation rates of both sexes had stayed constant. What is more, 4.5 million of these additionally created jobs are jobs in regular full-time employment. We claim that the commonly negative perception of the Japanese economy stems from a fundamental mistake: taking the »bubble economy« period up to 1991 as the point of reference when assessing the current state of the economy.