The Japanese economy: Abenomics looks a lot like Reaganomics

Japan needed a shakeup after 20-plus years in the doldrums

Explaining Japan’s economy to Western audiences is hard. One big reason for this is that explaining something as large and complex as a $5 trillion economy is an inherently difficult task — there are a lot of conflicting trends, regional differences and other wrinkles. A second reason is that Japan tends to be somewhat out of sync with the US and Europe — when the US was struggling in the early 1980s, Japan was powering ahead, and when the US recovered in the 1990s, Japan stagnated. A third reason is that the economic institutions that govern Japan — the centralised