Farewell Koizumi
Junichiro Koizumi, the former prime minister of Japan is a true inspiration source in many ways. He was until today the leader of the Liberal Democrat Party but has now retired.
Japan has been the strongest economy in the world, mostly because of it’s openness and their god diplomacy with their neighbours. Within Japan, Koizumi has pushed for new ways to trigger the moribound economy. He has been aiming to act against bad debts with commercial banks and the most controversal; privatize the postal savings system. He has also reorganize the factional structure of the LDP, moving it from it’s traditional agrarian base toward a more neoliberal as the poulation grows in major cities and declines in smaller ones. He spoke of the need for a period of painful restructuring in order to improve the future. By privatization of Japan Post (which many rural residents fear will reduce their access to basic services such as banking), Koizumi has also slowed down the LDP's heavy subsidies for infrastructure and industrial development in rural areas. These tensions have made Koizumi a controversial but popular figure within his own party and among the Japanese electorate.
Internationally he has become famous as the assertive prime minister, for example when it comes to the Japanese self defence force for Iraq. The stance against China and South Korea, the pursuit of pro active negotiations with North Korea and emphasizing Japan’s claims against Russia has characterize He has also created a friendly relationship with the United Stats and George W. Bush, even though people here in Nagasaki are a bit ambivalent against the USA (probably a memory of the atomic bomb).
It’s not a coincidence that Japan has one of the strongest economies in the world. I can compare the Japanese economy with the future Swedish one now when the shift in the parliament has taken place.
Today, Shinzo Abe took over. Let’s just hope that he’ll keep on doing the good job.
(The picuture is not taken by me, the first picture on this blog actually not taken by me. Ok, it's 2345, I came at 9.30 this morning, 14 hours at a lab and you can get 15 spinal cords and read some japanese news, if you ever wounder what to do one day).
Gozaimas
posted by Diana Chavlah at 12:47 a.m.
3 Comments:
One of the strongest economies in the world? You must be kidding... Japan was in recession for 12 years and only just emerged from it. Its recovery is still regarded as extremely fragile. It may be one of the world's largest economies but that's a very different accolade and rests more on previous development, the size of the domestic market, the high degree of capital concentration and the advanced nature of Japanese productive technology, all of which depended on being sheltered for 20 years after WWII by the yen being pegged artificially low against the dollar, making Japanese imports to the US extremely cheap, massive transfers of technology and expertise from the US to Japan, and Tokyo's maintenance of extremely high tariff barriers allowing it to dump cheap manufactures abroad, decimating other countries' industries (such as the UK motorcycle industry) and capturing market share for itself while keeping foreign imports out of Japan. The Japanese economic miracle has bog all to do with neoliberalism and everything to do with protectionism and state intervention in the market.
Lee,
Well, I said among the strongest ones. And even tough they dropped because of the economic reforms, for example change of the pension system that will cost them a lot. If you look at GDP/capita, then the richest country in the world is Bermuda according to CIA World Fact: http://sportsforum.ws/sd/factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html
Well, let’s just leave that unsaid.
The different welfare measurements just simply say different things. HDI (Human development index), where Norway is on top and Japan at nr 11 http://www.nutek.se/sb/d/209/a/566
And then we have the WISP (Weighted index of social procress), which was created by Richard Estes to provide us information about 40 different indicators. Factors such as health, medical care, equality between sex, environment, demography etc. Japan has a WISP of 0.91 according to the measurements that were done in 2000 (they only measure it every 5 year because of the time it takes).On the other hand, it’s really hard to find information about WISP, but 0.91 is a really god value (everything below 0.5 is bad, maximum is 1). You can find some information if you’d like on Richard Estes homepage.
So the measurements of different welfare indications is not enough to predict if a country is rich or not, but it is a help of course.
This is just a subjective observation, but I haven’t seen a single bun (=homeless, spelling?) since I arrived. And people seem to consume a lot, especially in the service area (since it’s cheap).
When a country with aroud 127 milion habitants has a the worlds third largest GDP, the economy is strong.
I have to agree with Diana. I have not studied much about the Japanese economy, but Japan is one of the most advanced countries in the world. Simple monetary measures like GDP growth do not acurately encompass economic welfare. The economic blogsphere had this debate recently as well about to what extent things like technological progress should be measured in welfare calculations.
For example, a simple GDP measure would say that a computer in 1990 which cost 2000 Euros would cost 200 Euros in 1995. On paper, GDP would then quantify 2000 Euros spent in 1995 is the same as in 1990. Yet in fact welfare has increased about 10 times for computers.
I think it is important to acknowledge that Koizumi's dedication to Elvis was probably the most important aspect of his career.
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