Overview

Until quite recently, the Japanese inspired a kind of puzzled awe. They had pulled themselves together from the ruin of war, built at breakneck speed a formidable array of export champions and emerged as the world's number two economy and largest net creditor nation, and they did it by flouting every rule of economic orthodoxy. Today, however, only the puzzlement remains - at Japan's inability to arrest its economic decline, for its festering banking crisis and the dithering of its policymakers. Why can't the Japanese government find the political will to fix the country's problems? This volume aims to answer why. The authors contend that the country has landed in a policy trap that defies easy solution. Deep-rooted political arrangements preclude the ""obvious"" measures urged on the country by so many observers. At the heart of Japan's dilemma, paradoxically, lies the most visible symbol of the country's economic success: its enormous, dollar-denominated trade surpluses. These huge accumulated surpluses have long exercised a growing and perverse influence on monetary policy, forcing Japan's authorities to support a build-up of deflationary dollars.

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9780815702221

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An important new book... --Hugo Restall, The Asian Wall Street Journal, 10/25/2002 Winner, 2002 Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award for Economics -- Award ... a provocative new book. --John Thornhill, Financial Times, 11/18/2002 [The book has] many astute... observations about the Japanese economic and political system. --Richard N. Cooper, Foreign Affairs, 5/1/2003 many astute and sometimes provocative observations about the Japanese economic and political system. -- Foreign Affairs

Author Information

Akio Mikuni is one of the most universally respected analysts of the Japanese economy in the global financial community. He is the president and founder of Mikuni & Co. Ltd, Japan's leading independent, investor-supported bond-rating agency. Mikuni was named one of the fifty most influential individuals in Asia by Business Week in 1999. He also has been the subject of profiles in the Financial Times and Fortune. R. Taggart Murphy, a former investment banker, is foreign professor, College of International Studies, Tsukuba University, Japan, and a nonresident senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies program at the Brookings Institution. His recent books include The Weight of the Yen: How Denial Imperils America's Future and Ruins an Alliance (W. W. Norton, 1997) and Ugokanu Nihon e no Shohosen ( Prescriptions for a Japan That Is Not Moving), (Mainichi Shinbunsha, 1998).

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