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The Great Divide: Japan Is a Model, Not a Cautionary Tale http://j.mp/18YZpSM スティグリッツ氏の日本称賛記事
June 9, 2013, 9:10 pm 10 Comments
Japan Is a Model, Not a Cautionary Tale
By JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ
BUT Japan’s slow growth does not look so bad under close examination. Any serious student of economic performance needs to look not at overall growth, but at growth related to the size of the working age population. Japan’s working age population (ages 15 to 64) shrank 5.5 percent from 2001 to 2010, while the number of Americans of that age increased by 9.2 percent ― so we should expect to see slower G.D.P. growth. But even before Abenomics, Japan’s real economic output, per member of the labor force, grew at a faster rate over the first decade of the century than that of the United States, Germany, Britain or Australia.
Still, Japan’s growth is far lower than it was before its crisis, in 1989. From our own recent experience in America, we know the devastating effects of even a short (albeit much deeper) recession: in America, we’ve had soaring inequality (with the top 1 percent securing all of the gains of the “recovery,” and even more income), increased joblessness, and a middle that has been falling farther and farther behind. Japan’s example shows that full recovery doesn’t happen on its own. Luckily for Japan, its government took steps to ensure that the extremes in inequality that happened in the United States weren’t manifest there, and now is finally being proactive about its growth.
And if we broaden the range of metrics we consider, we see that even after two decades of “malaise,” Japan’s performance is far superior to that of the United States.
Consider, for instance, the Gini coefficient, the standard measure of inequality. Zero represents perfect equality, and 1 stands for perfect inequality. While Japan’s Gini coefficient stands today at around 0.33, the number for the United States is 0.38, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. (Other data sources put the United States’ level of inequality at even higher levels.) In the United States, the average income of the top 10 percent is 15.9 times that of the bottom 10 percent ― compared with 10.7 times for Japan.
The reasons for these differences are political choices, not economic inevitability. Also according to the O.E.C.D., the Gini coefficient before taxes and transfer payments is about the same in the two countries: 0.499 for the United States, and 0.488 for Japan. But the United States does only a little to modulate its inequality, bringing it down to .38. Japan does much more, reducing the Gini coefficient to 0.33.
But if Japan has a problem with poverty among the very aged, it does much better on another front, one that has important implications for any country’s future: Some 14.9 percent of Japan’s children are poor, compared to a disheartening 23.1 percent of American children.
Broader measures of performance are equally indicative. Life expectancy at birth (a good measure of the health of the economy) is a world-leading 83.6 years in Japan, versus 78.7 years for Americans. And even this data does not expose the full scope of inequality in life expectancies. It’s been estimated that the longest-living 10th of Americans ― who tend to be the wealthiest Americans ― live almost as long as the average Japanese person. But our bottom 10th live about as long as the average person in Mexico or Argentina. The United Nations Development Program estimates that the effect of inequality on life expectancy in America is nearly twice as strong as it is in Japan.
Other measures also show Japan’s strengths. It is second-highest in the world for attainment of university education, well ahead of the United States. And even in periods of slow growth, Japan has run its economy in a way that has kept a lid on the unemployment rate. During the global financial crisis, the rate peaked at 5.5 percent; in the two decades of its malaise, it never surpassed 5.8 percent. This low unemployment is one of the reasons Japan has fared so much better than the United States.
Those are numbers we now look on with envy. American unemployment, and an overall weak labor market, hurts those in the middle and bottom in four ways.
First, those who lose their jobs obviously suffer ― and in America, especially so, because until Obamacare, they overwhelmingly depended on their employers for health insurance. The combination of the loss of a job and an illness sends many Americans to the brink of bankruptcy, or over it. Second, a weak labor market means that even those who have a job are likely to see their hours cut short. The official unemployment rate hides the huge numbers of Americans who have accepted part-time work, not because that’s what they wanted, but because that’s all there was. But even those who are supposed to be working full time see their incomes erode when their hours are cut back. Third, with so many seeking work and not getting it, employers are under no pressure to raise wages; wages do not even keep up with inflation. Real incomes decline ― and that’s what’s been happening to most middle-class American families. Finally, public expenditures of all sorts ― so important to those in the middle and bottom ― are cut back.
And an astonishingly small portion of Japanese women ― 7 percent, according to one estimate ― occupy senior positions in management.
They point to the fact that Japan’s indebtedness coincides with its long period of low growth. But even here, the data tell a more nuanced story. It is not the debt that caused the slow growth, but the slow growth that caused the deficit. Growth would have been even slower had the government not stimulated the economy.
Those who see Japan’s performance over the last decades as an unmitigated failure have too narrow a conception of economic success. Along many dimensions ― greater income equality, longer life expectancy, lower unemployment, greater investments in children’s education and health, and even greater productivity relative to the size of the labor force ― Japan has done better than the United States. It may have quite a lot to teach us. If Abenomics is even half as successful as its advocates hope, it will have still more to teach us.
まあ、成長戦略をどんどん打って出ることだね。
評論家たち、も失敗だ、成功だとまだ断定できもしないことを言っていないで、成長できる具体案を議論してもらいたいものです。
女性の社会進出、障害除去、援助は、誰もが一致する見解。これも目玉政策にしてもらいたいものだ。
大手の新聞社で、誰かを叩いたときのようにキャンペーンを張ってもらえれば、今頃日本はもっといい国になっていただろうね。
人にまとわり付いて、社会、政治問題にまとわりつく記者が少なすぎる。芸能記者と政治部の記者の境界があいまいな所以である。
