Lessons from the Inoue Zaisei and the Takahashi Zaisei
摘要
Since the 1992 recession, the performance of the Japanese economy has been the worst of the developed nations. Japan’s average rate of real economic growth was only 1.1% between 1992 and 2001, compared with 4.0% growth in the 1980s. The comparable figures for Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom were 3.7%, 3.3%, and 2.6%, respectively. The question is why this poor performance has occurred. A number of hypotheses have emerged, including the inadequacy of fiscal policy, inappropriate monetary policy leading to deflation, the low investment rate following over-investment during the bubble period of the late 1980s and early 1990s, financial disintermediation due to huge nonperforming loans, and a fall in the potential growth rate because of supply-side factors. In an attempt to repair the economy, the then Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi from 1998 until 2000 substantially increased government expenditures and cut both income and corporate taxes. The result was a huge increase in the stock of government bonds. In contrast, for the past three years, the then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi from 2001 untill 2006 largely reduced government expenditures and tried to improve the supply side of the Japanese economy. Koizumi was confident that regulated and inefficient public enterprises and financial corporations were responsible for Japan’s poor performance in the 1990s. Therefore, he intended to regenerate the Japanese economy by implementing structural reforms, including deregulation and privatization of public enterprises and financial corporations. Such economic reforms were undertaken in developed countries such as the United Kingdom and Australia and are now considered to have improved economic performance. However, we doubt whether the structural reforms succeeded in regenerating the Japanese economy. There had been a large deflationary gap in the Japanese economy since 1998, and it was highly likely that the structural reforms enlarged this gap by raisin