Unmaking the Japanese Miracle: Macroeconomic Politics, 1985–2000 - Softcover

"Unmaking the Japanese Miracle is a most excellent, readable, and well-documented record of the rise and fall of Japan's economy in the last fifteen years. Through its comprehensive and exhaustive analyses of the macroeconomic policies, institutions, and major actors, this book will prove both fully enlightening for the business community and thoroughly thought-provoking for political scientists and policy makers. It deserves to be widely read by all these people." -- Takeshi Ohta, Former Deputy Governor for International Affairs, Bank of Japan "This is a good book that advances a timely and worthy analysis of macroeconomic policymaking and failure in Japan since 1985. The author's valuable argument as well as his command of Japanese and of Japanese sources will make Unmaking the Japanese Miracle a significant contribution to the field." -- Kozo Yamamura, University of Washington

In recent years, Japan's economy has gone from model of success to object lesson in failure. William W. Grimes offers a richly detailed insider's view of the key macroeconomic policies and events in contemporary Japan, as well as a close examination of the causes and effects of these upheavals. A new preface sets the book's findings in the context of the continuing intensification of Japan's financial woes.It is difficult to believe that the "Bubble Economy" of the late 1980s and the failed attempts at economic stimulation in the following decade both arose from the same policies. In Unmaking the Japanese Miracle, Grimes shows that this is precisely what happened. Focusing less on what went wrong than on why it went wrong, Grimes finds that mistaken macroeconomic policies-loose money in the late 1980s, excessively tight money until 1992, and only grudging use of expansionary fiscal policy until 1998-largely caused Japan's economic problems. Based on scores of interviews with Japanese policymakers, his is the first political explanation of why these catastrophic policies were carried out by the Ministry of Finance, the Bank of Japan, and the Diet. Various economic shocks were met, Grimes says, with a consistent and often inappropriate pattern of responses. This pattern has fundamentally altered because of changes within the three policymaking institutions since 1998.