From our other sites
The story
According to IMF projections, Japan’s nominal GDP is expected to fall to 6th place in the world by 2027. The original article examines a claim circulating on social media that “if hardworking Japanese people who don’t do drugs are becoming poor, it must be a complete policy failure.” On 5ch, users debated the causes, citing the distinction between rising stock prices and real economic growth, Japan’s slow recovery after the Lehman Shock, differing views on the weak yen, comparisons with South Korea and China, and the history of the semiconductor industry’s decline. Opinions in the thread are split on whether this is a policy failure or a matter of national character.
10/22 (Thu) 6:36 AM
Diamond Online
According to IMF projections, Japan’s nominal GDP will fall to 6th in the world by 2027. Is the claim circulating on social media — that “poor people in Japan don’t do drugs and are hardworking, yet their poverty is entirely the result of policy failure” — actually true? This article examines the factors behind Japan’s economic stagnation. (Takahiro Suzuki, Chief Economist, Hyakunen Consulting)
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Read the original article here
What people said
It's growing, isn't it?
The Nikkei average has risen more than 7x compared to the ultra-strong-yen era under the DPJ government.
Basically, Japanese companies now have 7 times more money than they did under the DPJ.
As a result, employee wages have gone up, employment has increased, and investment has increased, right?
That investment creates more jobs in turn, which is why Japan's unemployment rate is among the lowest in the world.
Stock prices don't indicate economic growth.
If you only look at the hand-picked Nikkei average, sure, that's gone up — helped along by a government-engineered market, inflation,
and the weak yen.
2010 economic growth rates
Japan 4.14
USA 2.70
UK 2.26
France 1.84
Germany 4.14
Italy 1.53
Canada 3.09
One of the highest growth rates among developed nations.
Re: #35
The simple reason Japan was the only developed country that couldn't recover from the Lehman Shock
https://president.jp/articles/-/43068?page=1
Looking at Figure 1 in that article,
every developed country except Italy saw GDP climbing steadily after the Lehman Shock (2009),
but Japan's GDP didn't start climbing steadily until 2012, when Abe's LDP government took office.
Isn't that just because you're only looking at 2010?
The graph in Re: #113 shows the trend from 2003 to 2018,
and in that graph, GDP rose in 2010, but in 2011 Japan was the only developed country whose GDP fell.
If you look at Figure 1 in that source, the numbers are oddly given in yen for Japan — once you convert to dollars to match the others, Japan actually recovered quite a bit. Using the same currency unit for international comparisons should be a given anyway.
Do that, and you get this graph instead:
But that means in local-currency terms, Japan was the only developed country whose GDP fell in 2011.
GDP can also be thought of as per-capita income times population, so if income fell in yen terms, doesn't that mean Japan was the only G7 country where real yen-denominated wages actually dropped?
Wages aren't paid in dollars, so local currency might actually be the clearer way to judge whether an economy is recovering.
Doesn't it seem weird for Japan to still be giving aid to South Korea at this point?
2030
Japan: ~$36,800
South Korea: ~$39,300
2040
Japan: ~$47,000
South Korea: ~$53,600
2050
Japan: ~$57,500
South Korea: ~$67,700
2075
Japan: ~$87,600
South Korea: ~$101,800
Is this another forecast from Goldman Sachs — the same people who failed to predict their own country's and South Korea's financial troubles?
Which is it…?
Why do you assume it can't be both?
I think people are just too dumb. Kind of like the humans in Planet of the Apes who worship a nuclear missile.
Incompetent politicians make policy mistakes.
Incompetent voters keep electing that incompetence.
Both can simply be true at once.
When you consider that other countries' economies are so wrecked they can't even afford gasoline subsidies anymore, Japan is way better off.
Other countries could use the same trick too if they were willing to go the weak-bond route. They're just not doing it because they're operating on the assumption that the Iran war will drag on.
In the end, how much gasoline people use doesn't really change much whether there's a subsidy or not — they'd probably like to subsidize it too, but their economies are so wrecked they just don't have the budget.
At one bookstore, a part-time position has the same requirements as full-time — "do the same work" — yet the monthly salary is a mere 500-600 yuan (roughly ¥11,500-13,800).
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HVTdwfYacAECgft.jpg
Apparently China has 300 million rich people.
The remaining 1 billion are poor.
But 300 million rich people is already roughly the population of the entire US,
so you can see why that alone makes them incredibly powerful, right?
People have gotten poorer compared to the peak,
things are expected to keep gradually declining,
and neighboring countries are expected to keep rising —
isn't the point that something needs to be done about that?
Seems like it should be obvious without even having to ask.
Son: "I'm not going bald! My hairline is just receding!" (riffing on SoftBank's Masayoshi Son, a frequent target of hairline jokes)
Japan: "We're not getting poorer! Every other country is just getting richer!"
The lost 40 years
https://imgur.com/qwPZ7Bt.jpeg
https://imgur.com/NxQW2mk.jpeg
Back at the peak in the 1980s, 80% of the world's semiconductors were "MADE IN JAPAN."
Semiconductor companies across Japan held cross-shareholdings in each other, forming a single "Japan Inc." —
one giant fireball, essentially one massive conglomerate.
But the US forced it to be split apart and dismantled.
If that hadn't happened, every AI chip on Earth today would probably be made in Japan.
A policy that's guaranteed to lose isn't a "gamble" lol
You couldn't really say it was guaranteed to lose.
If Japanese companies, out of patriotism despite being profit-driven, had somehow prioritized Japan's future over easy short-term gains — pouring capital investment into Japan instead of overseas, and handing out special bonuses and allowances to employees who had lots of kids — Abenomics might have actually worked out.
…though judging by how Japanese companies actually behave, the odds of that were close to zero.
It's a mistake to expect companies to act out of patriotism.
Companies act on economic rationality.
You can't call that "anti-Japan."
It's politics' job to create an environment where investing in Japan is profitable and worthwhile.
Re: #900
"Capital has no nationality or borders."
A lot of people don't seem to get this obvious fact.
https://imgur.com/WIqbYyA.jpeg
Exactly.
And the punchline is that Iris Ohyama — a company with zainichi (Korean-Japanese) roots — ended up being the "patriotic company" that moved production back to Japan first, for some reason…
https://imgur.com/0Zd3x9n.jpeg
Has it become the world's ATM?
Sulking like that just because you lost makes you look weak.
Does GDP going up actually benefit anyone? About as much as making the rich even richer?
Everything comes down to dollar-denominated GDP — military power, scientific research, all of it.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
According to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook, Japan’s nominal GDP fell from 3rd to 4th place behind Germany in 2023, and is projected to drop further to 6th by 2027 as it is overtaken by India as well. This ranking is based on dollar-converted nominal figures, which are heavily affected by the weak yen, and is a different metric from Japan’s actual domestic real growth rate. That distinction fueled the thread’s clash between those who pointed to the rising Nikkei average as proof of economic growth and those who countered that stock prices and the real economy are separate things. The forecast that South Korea could overtake Japan in per-capita GDP also drew attention, but it’s worth noting this is a long-term projection from a private think tank, not a confirmed future. The debate tends to get framed as a binary — policy failure versus national character — but some in the thread pointed out that both could be true at once, and no simple conclusion was reached.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Breaking News+) thread ““ú–{‚ÌGDPA¢ŠE6ˆÊ“]—Ž‚Öc–ò•¨‚à‚â‚ç‚È‚¢‹Î•×‚È“ú–{l‚ª•n‚µ‚‚È‚é‹üJ‚ÍgŠ®‘S‚Èôƒ~ƒXh‚©H š11 [‚®‚êš]“.
Leave a Reply