Lessons from the Japanese experience. Towards a new economic Policy

Is Europe threatened by an economic slowdown similar to the one experienced by Japan after the bursting of a financial bubble in the early 1990s? Should a new economy policy be implemented to avoid such an outcome?
The aim of this book is to answer these two questions by revisiting the Japanese economic experience over the past twenty years in a comparative perspective, from the bursting of the bubble in 1990 to the more recent set of policies known as Abenomics since 2012.
We argue there is an urgent need to learn from Japan, whose experience is much richer than the conventional perception of an economy at a standstill. In particular, deflation or the evolution of public debt were studied closely by policymakers in the United States, but less so in Europe. Overall, the Japanese experience contributed to the evolution of macroeconomic thinking and to the definition of new economic policies after the Great recession if 2008. The challenge is less about preventing the entry into a crisis than about providing the means to avoid a long-term stagnation.
This presentation will be based on a book published in French from Editions de l’ENS (collection CEPREMAP).

 
Speakers

Sébastien Lechevalier is associate professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris), President of Fondation France-Japon de l’EHESS (http://ffj.ehess.fr/) and director of the French network of Asian studies (http://www.eurasiane.eu/). Specialist of inequalities and industrial dynamics, he is the author of various articles and books including The great transformation of Japanese capitalism (Routledge, 2014, published in Japanese from Iwanami shoten in 2015 as「日本資本主義の大転換」）

Brieuc Monfort, PhD, is an Associate Researcher at the Center for Advanced French-Japanese Studies (CEAFJP) at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris). He had worked for the IMF in Washington and for the French Treasury in Tokyo.

Moderator : Jean-Michel BUTEL (UMIFRE 19 – MFJ)
Org. : Bureau français de la MFJ
Co-org. : CCI France Japon
* English without translation