Word: gdp
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...government reported last week that unemployment had crossed the psychologically important 4 million barrier and stands at 9.7% of the workforce. The country's leading banks cut their growth forecast to .3% for 2002 and only 1% next year. Germany's state deficit is projected to be 3.75% of gdp, which breaches the limits in the European Stability and Growth Pact. The country is likely to exceed the 3% limit again next year...
...Forget (for now) the banking system crippled by mountains of bad loans, a government debt equal to 130% of the nation's GDP, deflation that sucks the life from corporate profits and a stock market hovering near its lowest point since 1983. There is a more fundamental ailment undermining the world's second-largest economy: Japan's labor force is one of the most unproductive in the industrialized world. And not by a little. According to the Japan Productivity Center for Socio-Economic Development, a government-affiliated research center, Japanese laborers are 40% less efficient than Americans, 20% less efficient...
...export industries like automobiles, electronics and computer hardware are, indeed, 20% more productive than the worldwide benchmark. But here's the problem: these industries, once you stop to count them, are quite few in number. Together, they make up only 10% of Japan's workforce and 10% of its GDP...
...what always worked so well in the past: emphasis on high-glamour manufacturing, new public-spending projects and continued domestic protection. Japan already has more infrastructure than it needs (its "bridges to nowhere" have been made famous by frequent ridicule in the local press) and government debt handily exceeds GDP?two good indicators that the returns on those Keynesian stimuli are diminishing. But like the laboratory pigeon that keeps hitting the lever even though the reward is no longer coming, Japan's government can't stop banging away with its favorite but increasingly useless palliatives: public spending and fiscal stimulus...
...With such changes, says Fukushima, Japan may manage to settle into a kind of affluent stasis, but the country is still probably finished as an economic overachiever. "The high-growth story in Japan is over," he says, predicting that a long-run GDP growth rate of 1% per year is probably the best the country can hope for. With far fewer people working, output may stagnate no matter how productive Japan's workforce becomes. All of which means that someday soon in the suburbs of Tokyo, and across the nation, you may have to start parking your...