「欧米経済、もっと悪い」 クルーグマン氏 日本に謝罪
2014年11月1日 夕刊
【ニューヨーク＝共同】米国のノーベル賞経済学者ポール・クルーグマン氏は、十月三十一日付の米紙ニューヨーク・タイムズに「日本への謝罪」と題するコラムを寄せた。一九九〇年代の後半以降、経済を立て直せない日本政府と日銀を批判してきたが「欧米も日本と同じか、それより悪い不景気に陥ってしまった」と自省している。
財政規律を気にしすぎて政策投資に二の足を踏む欧米の政府や、時期尚早の利上げに走った欧州中央銀行の例を挙げ「（金融危機のあった）二〇〇八年以降の欧米の政策は不十分か逆効果ですらあり、日本の失敗が小さく見えるほどだ」と指摘。
自身を含む欧米エコノミストが、日本を「先進国の経済運営でしてはならないことを教えてくれる反面教師」としてきたことを謝罪した。
欧州では経済が低迷を続け、景気が堅調とされる米国でも賃金や物価の伸び悩みが懸念されている。コラムには長期のデフレに陥った日本の経験に学べない欧米のエコノミストや政策決定者への皮肉が込められている。
クルーグマン氏はこれまでも、安倍政権下の異次元緩和や財政出動に支持を表明してきた。一方で消費税増税には一貫して反対している。
http://www.tokyo-np.co.jp/article/economics/news/CK2014110102000247.html
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist
Apologizing to Japan
OCT. 30, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/31/opinion/paul-krugman-apologizing-to-japan.html
[Paul Krugman]
TOKYO — For almost two decades, Japan has been held up as a cautionary tale, an object lesson on how not to run an advanced economy. After all, the island nation is the rising superpower that stumbled. One day, it seemed, it was on the road to high-tech domination of the world economy; the next it was suffering from seemingly endless stagnation and deflation. And Western economists were scathing in their criticisms of Japanese policy.
I was one of those critics; Ben Bernanke, who went on to become chairman of the Federal Reserve, was another. And these days, I often find myself thinking that we ought to apologize.
Now, I’m not saying that our economic analysis was wrong. The paper I published in 1998 about Japan’s “liquidity trap,” or the paper Mr. Bernanke published in 2000 urging Japanese policy makers to show “Rooseveltian resolve” in confronting their problems, have aged fairly well. In fact, in some ways they look more relevant than ever now that much of the West has fallen into a prolonged slump very similar to Japan’s experience.
The point, however, is that the West has, in fact, fallen into a slump similar to Japan’s — but worse. And that wasn’t supposed to happen. In the 1990s, we assumed that if the United States or Western Europe found themselves facing anything like Japan’s problems, we would respond much more effectively than the Japanese had. But we didn’t, even though we had Japan’s experience to guide us. On the contrary, Western policies since 2008 have been so inadequate if not actively counterproductive that Japan’s failings seem minor in comparison. And Western workers have experienced a level of suffering that Japan has managed to avoid.
What policy failures am I talking about? Start with government spending. Everyone knows that in the early 1990s Japan tried to boost its economy with a surge in public investment; it’s less well-known that public investment fell rapidly after 1996 even as the government raised taxes, undermining progress toward recovery. This was a big mistake, but it pales by comparison with Europe’s hugely destructive austerity policies, or the collapse in infrastructure spending in the United States after 2010. Japanese fiscal policy didn’t do enough to help growth; Western fiscal policy actively destroyed growth.
Or consider monetary policy. The Bank of Japan, Japan’s equivalent of the Federal Reserve, has received a lot of criticism for reacting too slowly to the slide into deflation, and then for being too eager to raise interest rates at the first hint of recovery. That criticism is fair, but Japan’s central bank never did anything as wrongheaded as the European Central Bank’s decision to raise rates in 2011, helping to send Europe back into recession. And even that mistake is trivial compared with the awesomely wrongheaded behavior of the Riksbank, Sweden’s central bank, which raised rates despite below-target inflation and relatively high unemployment, and appears, at this point, to have pushed Sweden into outright deflation.
The Swedish case is especially striking because the Riksbank chose to ignore one of its own deputy governors: Lars Svensson, a world-class monetary economist who had worked extensively on Japan, and who had warned his colleagues that premature rate increases would have exactly the effects they did, in fact, have.
So there are really two questions here. First, why has everyone seemed to get this so wrong? Second, why has the West, with all its famous economists — not to mention the ability to learn from Japan’s woe — made an even worse mess than Japan did?
The answer to the first question, I think, is that responding effectively to depression conditions requires abandoning conventional respectability. Policies that would ordinarily be prudent and virtuous, like balancing the budget or taking a firm stand against inflation, become recipes for a deeper slump. And it’s very hard to persuade influential people to make that adjustment — just look at the Washington establishment’s inability to give up on its deficit obsession.
As for why the West has done even worse than Japan, I suspect that it’s about the deep divisions within our societies. In America, conservatives have blocked efforts to fight unemployment out of a general hostility to government, especially a government that does anything to help Those People. In Europe, Germany has insisted on hard money and austerity largely because the German public is intensely hostile to anything that could be called a bailout of southern Europe.
I’ll be writing more soon about what’s happening in Japan now, and the new lessons the West should be learning. For now, here’s what you should know: Japan used to be a cautionary tale, but the rest of us have messed up so badly that it almost looks like a role model instead.
