생각보다 잘 나가는 아베노믹스

생각보다 잘 나가는 아베노믹스

최근의 일본 경제 지표 부진(물가하락, 실업률 증가)은 유가하락과 구직행렬 참가자 증가에 의한 착시 현상

-  디플레 탈피하여 인플레로 전환중

-  실업률은 사실상 완전 고용 상태

옮긴이 의견  )

한국에서는 "인구론"이 회자되고 있습니다. ( "인"문계 대졸자 "구"십프로가 "논"다 )

아베노믹스 이후, 일본에서는 대졸 취업률이 구십프로가 넘어서 사실상 완전고용 상태라고 합니다.  창조경제는 실패하는 듯 보이고, 아베노믹스는 상당한 성공이라고 봅니다.

한국은 "씰 데 없는" 위안부 문제에 매달려 허송세월, 일본은 매정하리만치 자기 이익에 충실.  ( "위안부 어쩌고 저쩌고" 떠들어서 박 대통령 개인의 지지율 상승에는 도움 되었을 듯 하나, 명분싸움에 매몰되어 실리는 완전히 껍데기만 남은 후기 조선시대로 돌아 간 것은 아닌지 .... 이래서 "역사는 반복된다" 라고 하나....)

실업률이 높을수록 정권교체 가능성이 높아집니다. 청년실업뿐만이 아니라 실버세대 실업도 큰 문제입니다.

현 정부 하는 모양새로 보아서 단기간에 일자리를 획기적으로 늘리는 방법은 나오지 않을 듯 싶습니다. 이럴때 청년들은  일본으로 눈을 돌려야 합니다. 일본어 공부는 다른 언어에 비하여 상대적으로 쉽다고 합니다.  무작정 나가야 합니다. 일본을 씹어 댈것만이 아니라, 무작정 일본으로 진출하여야 합니다.

원본 :  

http://www.wsj.com/articles/abenomics-is-doing-better-than-you-think-1444232698

http://kr.wsj.com/posts/2015/10/08/%ec%95%84%eb%b2%a0%eb%85%b8%eb%af%b9%ec%8a%a4%ea%b0%80-%ec%8b%a4%ed%8c%a8%ed%96%88%eb%8b%a4%ea%b3%a0/

Abenomics Is Doing Better Than You Think

Despite headwinds, Japan’s Abe has scored solid wins against stagnation and deflation

By Greg Ip 

 

Oct. 7, 2015 11:44 a.m. ET  

  

A recent run of bad news has revived fears that Japan is returning to its familiar role as sick man of the world economy. Its economy shrank in the second quarter and may have done so again in the third, which would qualify as a recession. Inflation has dropped perilously close to zero.

So it might be tempting to write off Abenomics as a failure. That would be a mistake.

Abenomics, the program of radical economic stimulus introduced by Prime Minister  Shinzo Abe, has been more successful than many think. Yet that success is fragile, and Japanese leaders have more work ahead to entrench its achievements.

Mr. Abe was elected in 2012 on a platform of three “arrows”: monetary stimulus to defeat deflation, short-term fiscal stimulus coupled with long-term debt reduction, and structural reform to lift Japan’s long-term growth rate.

In early 2013, the Bank of Japan’s new governor,  Haruhiko Kuroda, shot the first arrow with massive purchases of government bonds aimed at boosting inflation, then in negative territory, to 2% in two years. The plan was dubbed “quantitative and qualitative easing,” or QQE.

That goal remains far off, but not as far off as implied by the 0.2% inflation rate, which has been held down by falling oil prices. The Bank of Japan’s “core-core” price index, which excludes energy, fresh food and the impact of a consumption-tax increase implemented last year, was up 1.1% in August from a year earlier, the most since 2008. Prices are rising for more products than are falling, and a real-time daily inflation index based on supermarket scanner data is rising at the fastest rate since 2009.

There are also modest signs wages are responding: Unionized workers’ base pay increases were 0.7% in the fiscal year ended in March, the highest rate since the late 1990s.

Japan’s negative growth is not as catastrophic as it sounds. Because of the country’s shrinking labor force and low productivity growth, underlying “potential” growth for the economy is 0.5%, or lower. That means modest shocks such as last year’s tax increase and a slump in exports to China more easily push growth into negative territory, without initiating a genuine cyclical downturn. 

A better indicator of underlying economic health is unemployment, which adjusts for a shrinking labor force. It has edged down from 4.1%, when QQE began, to 3.4% now. Unlike in the U.S., this is not because workers are dropping out; the share of Japan’s population over 15 working or looking for work—the participation rate—has edged higher since 2012, largely thanks to a remarkable rise in participation by women and the elderly.

Thanks to modest growth and rising prices, Japan’s nominal gross domestic product—its output of goods and services without adjusting for inflation—has been rising since QQE began, after several decades of stagnation. If nominal GDP keeps growing while interest rates stay near zero, it will vastly ease the burden of Japan’s massive government debt, which now approaches 250% of GDP.

Still, this is hardly a resounding success. Economists  Joshua Hausman and  Johannes Wieland note that private forecasts of Japanese GDP in coming years are no higher than before Abenomics began. They found no evidence that net debtors and the young, who would be most likely to spend more in response to more stimulative monetary policy, had done so. The weaker yen has not produced the expected boom in Japan’s trade or restrained imports much.

Why hasn’t Abenomics had more bang? Partly, bad luck: China’s slowdown has hit Japanese exports, and falling oil prices have made it harder to persuade business and the public that higher inflation is here to stay. Mr. Abe also bears some blame: Last year’s consumption-tax increase set back growth, and the government has delivered few structural reforms to speed up underlying growth.

That could be about to change. This week’s completion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership signals a greater will by Mr. Abe to take politically unpopular actions to expose inefficient parts of Japan’s economy to greater competition. “It’s time for us to start innovating and step into a new, open world,” Mr. Abe exhorted this week.

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But the biggest problem is that even as inflation has turned positive, wages have been slow to follow. A decade of deflation has undermined the practice of firms awarding across-the-board wage boosts each spring. Japanese firms increasingly meet new sales with part-time and temporary workers with fewer protections and lower pay than full-time permanent workers. This erosion of workers’ bargaining leverage has made it harder to get wages rising even in the face of historically low unemployment and buoyant profits, a phenomenon the U.S. has also experienced.

Changing this dynamic is Japan’s biggest challenge. Mr. Abe has pressed firms to deploy more of their cash on salaries and capital expansion and encouraged them to create more permanent jobs. But persuading firms to do so will likely take even lower unemployment, and confidence that growth is not about to evaporate again because of an ill-timed tax increase or a recession in the rest of the world. Mr. Abe can certainly avoid the first; the second is out of his hands.