Japan, the world's second largest economy after the United States, has played some role in the response to Wall Street's housing-related meltdown. Japan has also, so far, been relatively unscathed by the present financial crisis.
Taro Aso, who has been chosen to be Japan's next Prime Minister, has indicated that his goal is to stimulate the Japanese economy to buoy the global economy. Aso has pledged to reverse a decade of reforms which included shrinking the government and freeing Japan's economy. He has advocated to revive the Japanese economy with increased government spending and tax cuts for businesses and individuals. This is imposing pure fiscal policies.
These measures seem particularly aimed at rural areas where there has been growing discontent because local economies lag behind prosperous cities like Tokyo. Hopefully, this will bring more equality and shorten the gap between the rural and urban economies.
4 comments:
It almost seems like they're trying to do the opposite of what had happened in Japan previously, with workers moving from the agricultural sector (which would be the more rural economies) to the industrial sector, which would be the urban economies. Perhaps too many of Japan's workers moved to the cities.
The governments efforts in rural areas also seems to be in concert with what we learned about equity in the Asian Model and specifically in Japan. Mainly that although Japan did encourage urbanization it also made real efforts to stop its rural areas from lagging too far behind.
The government's intervention may actually help Japan. I see that by doing this the government is playing a re distributive role and is attempting to implement shared growth there by achieving a higher level of social cohesion by making sure that the rural areas don't fall too bar behind the urban. i will be interested in seeing how effective Aso's plan will be.
Korea's development is quite similar to Japan except that Japanese government was much more concerned about its rural economy and social equity as well. Now, more than one fourth of total population of Korea live in Seoul, the capital of Korea. However, the concentration of wealth is more severe.
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