Japan's Great Stagnation : Forging Ahead, Falling Behind / W.R. Garside.

Originally published: 2012.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Before stagnation: legacies of the high-growth period -- Catch-up growth and maturity: developmental ism in retrospect -- Developmentalism as ideology -- Economic and financial policy in a changing international environment: the origins and course of the bubble economy -- 'Losing a decade': economic and financial hubris in recessionary Japan, 1990-97 -- Funding a recovery: the impact and fate of fiscal policy, 1990-97 -- Banking crises, monetary policy and deflation, 1997-2000 -- Reform without salvation: Japan 1997-2000 -- Recession, stagnation and the labour market: continuity and change in teh 1990s -- 'Lost decades?' Japan's politiccal economy in the new millennium.

This timely book presents a critical examination of the developmental premises of Japan's high-growth success and its subsequent drift into recession, stagnation and piecemeal reform. The country, which within a few decades of wartime defeat mounted a serious challenge to American hegemony, appeared incapable of fully adjusting to shifting economic circumstance once the impulses of catch-up growth and the good fortune of an accommodating international environment faded. The banking crises, spiralling government debt, and stagnant growth experienced by major industrialized nations in recent years have evoked renewed interest in Japan's economic denouement since the 1990s. To many, Japan's drift into recession and financial crisis during the early 1990s, and later into stagnation and prolonged deflation, demonstrated precisely what not to do when fashioning remedial policy. This book details the legacies of Japan's high-growth success and how they affected Japan's capacity to cope with shifting national and international circumstance from the 1980s. It reviews the contentious debates over the causes and consequences of the 'bubble economy' and the 'lost decade', and assesses the extent to which reforms since 1997 have been compromised by lingering attachments to Japan's distrinctive post-war political economy.