December 13, 2014
Due to Japan’s national debt, which is well more than twice its GDP, Japan’s children are burdened with interest payments that are close to 0.8 percent of GDP. That sounds pretty awful right? How are the kids going to be able to make it?
If the sarcasm isn’t obvious, then you need some basis of comparison here. The interest burden in the United States is now 1.4 percent of GDP. When our children were really being crushed by the burden of the debt back in the early 1990s the interest burden peaked at a bit more than 3.0 percent of GDP, a bit less than four times Japan’s current burden. In fact, the figure of 0.8 percent of GDP overstates the true burden since much of this money is paid to Japan’s central bank and then refunded to the government.
The prompt for this discussion is an article in the Washington Post about the prospects for Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his economic program, now that he has called snap elections. To get an assessment of the impact of Japan’s debt on the welfare of future generations the Post turned to Kayoko Kamiya, who is identified as “a 43-year-old housewife.”
“Well, we are only shifting the burden to my children, so it’s tricky, … Raising the tax [a consumption tax increase that had been scheduled to go into effect in April, but now has been delayed by Abe] earlier would make things at least easier later. I feel unsure if it’s right that the current generation doesn’t take care of the debt.”
The piece also tells us that the bond rating agencies (yes, those people who rated subprime mortgage backed securities as Aaa) are threatening to downgrade Japan’s debt. It might have been worth pointing out that the financial markets appear to disagree with the bond rating agencies. The interest rate on 10-year Japanese government bonds is 0.40 percent.
In a piece providing an assessment of the economy’s performance under Abe, it would have been worth noting that Japan’s employment rate has risen by 2.2 percentage points since Abe took office at the end of the 2012. This would be the equivalent of adding more than 5 million workers in the United States.
Addendum:
This piece wrongly asserts that Japan has been in a deflationary spiral over the last 15 years. This is not true. It has consistently had very low inflation rates that did in some years turn negative. However, the deflation rate never exceeded -1.0 percent and it has not accelerated, as would be implied by a delfationary spiral. The basic problem in Japan is the same as in Europe, the inflation rate has been too low over the last two decades.
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