Professor Hugh Patrick discusses the impact of the global economic crisis on Japan and outlines the road to recovery.
"It was different that in the United States where we had a housing crisis and then a financial meltdown," Patrick says.
"[Japan's] problem is that over the last five or six years, they've depended too much on exports and on domestic business investment as the sources of demand in the economy, and not enough on consumption," he continues.
Bio
Hugh Patrick
Professor Patrick is recognized as a leading specialist on the Japanese economy and on Pacific Basin economic relations. He is the director of the Center on Japanese Economy and Business
Columbia Business School. His major fields of published research on Japan, which include 15 books and some 60 articles and essays, are macroeconomic performance and policy, banking and financial markets, government-business relations and Japan-United States economic relations.
He has been awarded Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships and the Ohira Prize, and he has been a visiting professor at Hitotsubashi University, University of Tokyo and University of Bombay. Patrick, who joined the Columbia faculty after some years as professor of economics and director of the Economic Growth Center at Yale University, is also codirector of Columbia's APEC Study Center.
Jane Trombley
Jane Trombley is Director of Public Relations at Columbia Business School.
Maybe Japan has too much manufacturing capacity. why is there a need to stimulate Japanese domestic demand, the people (apparently) have more than enough stuff already? is it not a more sustainable strategy to pull some of the billions of people living on less than a dollar a day out of poverty and turn them into consumers.