LAUSANNE, Switzerland -- The 21st century has not gotten off to a particularly brilliant start. Greed, corruption and dishonesty are pervasive. Scandals are rocking the world of business and politics in America and Europe. The chances of the Bush/Cheney administration becoming paralyzed by investigations into skulduggery arising from the two's past business practices in the oil industry are quite high. Europe, France in particular, is wallowing in murky dealings. Even such an erstwhile icon as Percy Barnevik, former chairman of Sweden's ABB, has fallen into disgrace.
Yet, as The Economist of July 13 pointed out: "Nothing in America or Europe matches the rot in the state of Japan."
The heavy price that Japan is paying, with respect not only to its economic stagnation but also to its internal social crisis of confidence and its external image of pathetic irrelevance, arises in good part from the excessive protectionism practiced for the past five decades. Although there may have been a rationale in the early postwar years of economic reconstruction for the protectionist blanket in which Japan was enveloped, it had disappeared probably by the 1970s, definitely by the '80s.