HKS Authors

See citation below for complete author information.

Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus

Abstract

The current tensions between China and Japan have revived talk about how far Japan has fallen since its glory years of the 1980s. To the extent that this sense of decline is grounded in reality, can Japan recover? Japan’s economy has suffered two decades of slow growth because of the poor policy decisions that followed the collapse of the country’s massive asset-price bubble in the early 1990s. In 2010, China’s economy surpassed Japan’s in total size, though it is only one-sixth the size in per capita terms. In 1988, eight of the top ten companies in the world by market capitalization were Japanese; today, none is.

Citation

Nye, Jr., Joseph S. "Japan's Options." Daily News (Egypt), November 22, 2010.