Japan has experienced two “lost decades”, and is currently entering a third. Between 1960 and 1990, the country’s GDP grew at an average annual rate of 6.2 per cent. From post-war devastation, the Japanese people picked themselves up, worked extremely hard and built the second-largest economy in the world, with help from the Americans. As Japanese businesses snapped up real estate in the West, alarmed analysts at one time warned that Japan Incorporated was poised to take over the slowing-down developed world – not unlike how some talk about China today. But in 1991, the asset bubble in Japan
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