Contests conventional wisdom on Japan's postwar economic success and its economic and political problems in the 1990s, providing a new account of these conditions.In this book, the authors address Japan's economic crisis of the 1990s. They argue that most attempts to reconcile Japan's past success with its current problems have been inadequate, primarily because scholars fail to fully understand how Japan's political-economic system was organized and how it operated in the past. Revealing that certain long-term political and economic trends suggested in subtle but unambiguous ways that the crisis of the 1990s was long in the making, the authors offer an alternative explanation for Japan's postwar political-economic trajectory and a better understanding of the challenges that Japan currently faces.
Dick Beason is Professor of Economics at the University of Alberta and the coauthor (with Jason James) of The Political Economy of Japanese Financial Markets: Myths versus Reality. Dennis Patterson is Professor of Political Science at Texas Tech University.
Tables and Figures Acknowledgments I. The Misunderstood Country 1. The Japan That Never Was2. How Different Is Different? Bureaucrats, Politicians, and Economic Policy Making in Postwar Japan II. Political Economics in a Capitalist Japan 3. The Problem of Japanese Industrial Policy4. Management Practices and Labor Relations: A Japanese System or Economic Incentives?5. The Postwar Japanese Economy: From High Growth to Structural Adjustment III. Politics and Policy Making in a Democratic Nation 6. The Electoral Origins of Japan's Economic Policies7. Political Change and Economic Policy Making8. Postwar Japanese Politics: From LDP Predominance to Coalition Politics IV. Japan in the New Millennium 9. The Past in Japan's Political-Economic Future Notes References Index
Michael S. Pardo, Dennis Patterson, University of Alabama School of Law) Pardo, Michael S. (Henry Upson Sims Professor of Law, Henry Upson Sims Professor of Law, Rutgers University School of Law) Patterson, Dennis (Board of Governors Professor of Law and Philosophy, Board of Governors Professor of Law and Philosophy