Japan has had two decades of sluggish growth as it went through the bursting of the late 1980s bubble and a subsequent banking crisis. Are many of the Western economies that saw their own bubbles burst after the 2008 financial crisis going to follow a similar path? And is Japan, whose ratio of public debt to gross domestic product is the highest among industrialized nations, headed for the same fiscal crisis that has gripped several European economies in recent years?
These were among the questions pondered by four veteran journalists from Britain who discussed various economic challenges facing both the United Kingdom and Japan during a June 24 symposium in Tokyo organized by the Keizai Koho Center. Naoki Tanaka, president of the Center for International Public Policy Studies, served as moderator of the discussions.
Despite its mounting public debt and lack of government action to reduce it, Japan is not likely to face a fiscal crisis anytime soon but will not be able to avoid consolidation efforts much longer, said Jeremy Warner, assistant editor of The Daily Telegraph.