何回も日本人を勇気づけて来てくれたクルーグマン先生が、また強烈な日本びいきを発した。
載ったのはニューヨークタイムズの電子版 2023.7.25だが、
ただしSUBSCRIBER-ONLY NEWSLETTERだ。
What Happened to Japan?
Paul Krugman
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ポール･クルーグマンが語る、日本では本当は何が起きたのか (NYT 2023.7.25・火)
日本では1980年代末のバブルの後に長期の停滞が続いていると考えていられるが、非常に重要な点を見落としている。｢労働人口の急減｣を考慮すると一人当たりGDPの1995年以降の伸びはアメリカと遜色がない。男性の中心的労働年齢の失業率も上手にコントロール、15-24才の若年層のそれは1990年代は増加したがその後は逆転している。中国の今の若年層の失業の急増とは対照的だ。日本でこれが可能だったのは大きな赤字を伴う財政支出の実施のお陰で、この手法は人口減少下での政策の手本となる物なのかも知れない。日本は思われているよりも遥かにダイナミズムや文化的創造性、バイタリティに富んでいる。中国には日本の二の舞かの懸念があるが中国が日本社会の結束力を再現できるかには疑問があり、専制的政治の元で経済は日本より悪くなるだろう。
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What Happened to Japan?（抜粋）
Paul Krugman
Here’s the story you may have heard: In the late 1980s Japan experienced a monstrous stock and real estate bubble, which eventually burst. Even now, the Nikkei stock average is significantly below the peak it reached in 1989. When the bubble burst, it left behind troubled banks and an overhang of corporate debt, which led to a generation of economic stagnation.
There’s some truth to aspects of this story, but it misses the most important factor in Japan’s relative decline: demography. Thanks to low fertility and unwillingness to accept immigrants, Japan’s working-age population has been declining quite rapidly since the mid-1990s. The only way Japan could have avoided a relative decline in the size of its economy would have been to achieve much faster growth in output per worker than other major economies, which it didn’t.
Given the demography, however, Japan hasn’t done too poorly. Here’s a comparison of U.S. and Japanese growth in real G.D.P. per working-age adult since 1994:
But people have been predicting a Japanese debt crisis for decades, and it hasn’t materialized. In some ways, Japan, rather than being a cautionary tale, is a kind of role model — an example of how to manage difficult demography while remaining prosperous and socially stable.
There are some obvious similarities between China now and Japan in 1990. China has a wildly unbalanced economy, with too little consumer demand, kept afloat only by a hypertrophied real estate sector, and its working-age population is declining. Unlike Japan in 1990, most of the Chinese economy is still well behind the technological frontier, so it should have better prospects for rapid productivity growth, but there are growing concerns that China may have fallen into the “middle-income trap” that seems to afflict many emerging economies, which grow rapidly but only up to a point, then stall out.
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