Japan's lost decade

de Tim Callen, Jonathan David Ostry

Japan's economic performance since the early 1990s has been disappointing, both in relation to its own history and relative to the record of other major industrial countries. Real GDP growth has averaged 1 percent over the past 10 years, well below that in other OECD countries, and only one-fourth of the 4 percent annual avergae growth rate recorded in Japan in the 1980s. Japan, moreover, experienced three recessions in the past decade, in contrast to the trend in other industrial countries toward milder and less frequent downturns in the postwar period. Meanwhile, nominal GDP in 2001 was approximately the same as in (1995), as moderate deflation has become entrenched. This poor economic performance has led some commentators to call the 1990s Japan's "lost decade."