Japan’s Economic Mess

The Nobel committee has never given a prize for economics to a Japanese, and it’s just as well: the committee would probably give it to the wrong man. The West usually attributes Japan’s economic success to large-scale government directives’ and whiz-bang “industrial policies” that, with a few significant exceptions, have contributed little to Japan’s economic growth. For Japan actually has two economies. One, the internationalized manufacturing economy, is one of the freest and most productive in the world. The other, Japan’s domestic economy, is a mess.

Japan’s manufacturing sector has exploded since the 1950s, largely because Japan abandoned interventionist government policies in favor of free-market principles. This revolution in the Zeitgeist occurred largely through the efforts of Professor Ryutaro Komiya of the University of Tokyo, a conservative economist little known in the West. No advocate of the free market has been so successful since Adam Smith.

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Robert Chapman Wood

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The Nobel committee has never given a prize for economics to a Japanese, and it’s just as well: the committee would probably give it to the wrong man. The West usually attributes Japan’s economic success to large-scale government directives’ and whiz-bang “industrial policies” that, with a few significant exceptions, have contributed little to Japan’s economic growth. For Japan actually has two economies. One, the internationalized manufacturing economy, is one of the freest and most productive in the world. The other, Japan’s domestic economy, is a mess.

Japan’s manufacturing sector has exploded since the 1950s, largely because Japan abandoned interventionist government policies in favor of free-market principles. This revolution in the Zeitgeist occurred largely through the efforts of Professor Ryutaro Komiya of the University of Tokyo, a conservative economist little known in the West. No advocate of the free market has been so successful since Adam Smith.