Japan, then, is the rare cautionary tale that's turned into a success story. When you put it that way, it's pretty impressive that Japan's economy didn't shrink at all in the 1990s but only stopped growing for a few years. That makes it impossible to judge Japan's economy by its GDP, at least in comparison to others, because you wouldn't expect it to be growing very much, if at all, when its workforce isn't. It's hardly a knock on Japan that its 70-year-olds aren't producing a lot of economic output. That period, not so coincidentally, is when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe started saying he'd do whatever it took to revive the country's economic fortunes.

Source: Washington Post June 04, 2018 16:20 UTC