Japanese History - Economic Aspects, Japan - International Business, Structural Adjustment, Japanese History - 1945 - Present, Japan - Politics & Government, Industrial Policies, Economic Policies in Asia

The Japan That Never Was: Explaining the Rise and Decline of a Misunderstood Country

Name: The Japan That Never Was: Explaining the Rise and Decline of a Misunderstood Country
Author: Dick Beason
ISBN: 9780791460405

by Dick Beason, Dennis Patterson

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Overview

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.

Author Biography: 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.

Synopsis

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.

Foreign Affairs

Economist Beason and political scientist Patterson have teamed up to challenge the conventional interpretation of Japan's postwar "miracle" economy and its collapse in the 1990s. As their title bluntly puts it, Japan never was what most scholars claimed: a state-guided economy. They dismiss the idea that Japan's bureaucrats skillfully selected industries for state aid, asserting instead that it was politicians who guided decisions. Moreover, they argue, Japan's postwar success was not as awesome and the recent downturn not as dramatic as has been made out. Beason and Patterson have an important argument to make about the difficult decisions Japan faces as it prepares to carry out political and economic reforms. Unfortunately, the strenuous effort they put into criticizing the work of Japan specialists obscures their original findings.