THE GOVERNMENT OF MODERN JAPAN: THE JAPANESE BUREAUCRACY Economic Policies (1990s) |
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Gerald L. Curtis :: The other reason that the bureaucrats in the 1990s came under more severe attack than was ever true before was because of the failures of the Ministry of Finance’s economic policies. Japan in the 1990s suffered from a chronic recessionary situation. The so-called bubble economy of the 1980s — the economy that led Japan at the end of the 1980s to be the second largest economy in the world with the most powerful banks heavily investing in the U.S. and elsewhere — that bubble collapsed just a few years later in the early 1990s, and the Ministry of Finance’s policies to deal with this collapse of the bubble simply exacerbated the problems. So that by the end of the 1990s Japan was in serious economic difficulty, with growing unemployment, increasing bankruptcies, and with a financial system that was on the brink of major collapse. This combination of scandals — involving corruption among bureaucrats and what was seen as the failures of the bureaucrats to craft the right policies to deal with Japan’s economic situation in the 1990s — together combined to create huge pressures for fundamental bureaucratic administrative reform, which has become one of the major issues on the Japanese political agenda. |
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