Here is Tyler Cowen on Twitter:

Still not seeing much discussion of 4.1% unemployment rate in Japan, would love to see “jump start” defined.

What Tyler is basically saying is that there really is not an argument for “jump starting” the Japanese economy with fiscal and monetary stimulus when unemployment is this low. I many ways I share Tyler’s skepticism about “stimulus” in the case of Japan.

I have long argued that Japanese story is a lot more complicated than it is normally said to be (my first post on the topic was: “Japan’s deflation story is not really a horror story” from October 2011). It is correct that Japan’s lost decade was not a story of two lost decades and in my view quantitative easing ended the “lost decade” in 2001. This is what I said in my post “Japan shows that QE works”

In early 2001 the Bank of Japan finally decided to listen to the advise of Milton Friedman and as the graph clearly shows this is when Japan started to emerge from the lost decade and when real GDP/capita started to grow in line with the other G7 (well, Italy was falling behind…).

The actions of the Bank of Japan after 2001 are certainly not perfect and one can clearly question how the BoJ implemented QE, but I think it is pretty clearly that even BoJ’s half-hearted monetary easing did the job and pull Japan out of the depression. In that regard it should be noted that headline inflation remained negative after 2001, but as I have shown in my previous post Bank of Japan managed to end demand deflation (while supply deflation persisted).

And yes, yes the Bank of Japan of course should have introduces much clearer nominal target (preferably a NGDP level target) and yes Japan has once again gone back to demand deflation after the Bank of Japan ended QE in 2007. But that does not change that the little the BoJ actually did was enough to get Japan growing again.

This graph of GDP/capita in the G7 countries illustrates my point:

As I said in my earlier post: “A clear picture emerges. Japan was a star performer in 1980s. The 1990s clearly was a lost decade, while Japan in the past decade has performed more or less in line with the other G7 countries. In fact there is only one G7 country with a “lost decade” over the paste 10 years and that is Italy.”

Hence, Japan came out of the crisis from 2001. However, it should also be noted that Japan has once again fallen into crisis and more importantly Japan’s monetary policy certainly is not based on a rule based framework so the risk that Japan will continue to fall back into crisis remains high. This in my view is a discussion about securing Japan a “Monetary constitution” rather than about stimulus. Unfortunately Prime Minister Abe’s new government do seem to be more focused on short-term stimulus rather than on real institutional reform.

There is no such thing as fiscal policy

– and that goes for Japan as well

The Abe government is not only pursuing expansionary monetary policies, but has also announced that it wants to ease fiscal policy dramatically. This obviously will scare any Market Monetarist – or anybody who are simply able to realise that there is a budget constrain that any government will have to fulfill in the long-run.

This is what I earlier have said on the fiscal issue in the case of Japan:

Furthermore, it is clear that Japan’s extremely weak fiscal position to a large extent can be explained by the fact that BoJ de facto has been targeting 0% NGDP growth rather than for example 3% or 5% NGDP growth. I basically don’t think that there is a problem with a 0% NGDP growth path target if you start out with a totally unleveraged economy – one can hardly say Japan did that. The problem is that BoJ changed its de facto NGDP target during the 1990s. As a result public debt ratios exploded. This is similar to what we see in Europe today.

So yes, it is obvious that Japan can’t not afford “fiscal stimulus” – as it today is the case for the euro zone countries. But that discussion in my view is totally irrelevant! As I recently argued, there is no such thing as fiscal policy in the sense Keynesians claim. Only monetary policy can impact nominal spending and I strongly believe that fiscal policy has very little impact on the Japanese growth pattern over the last two decades.

Above I have basically added nothing new to the discussion about Japan’s lost decade (not decades!) and fiscal and monetary policy in Japan, but since Scott brought up the issue I thought it was an opportunity to remind my readers (including Scott) that I think that the Japanese story is pretty simple, but also that it is wrong that we keep on talking about Japan’s lost decades. The Japanese story tells us basically nothing new about fiscal policy (but reminds us that debt ratios explode when NGDP drops), but the experience shows that monetary policy is terribly important.

My advise: Target an 3% NGDP growth level path and balance the budget 

My advise to the Abe government would therefore be for the Bank of Japan to introduce proper monetary policy rules and I think that an NGDP level targeting rule targeting a growth path of 3% would be suiting for Japan given the negative demographic outlook for Japan. Furthermore, if the BoJ where to provide a proper framework for nominal stability then the Japanese government should begin a gradual process of fiscal consolidation by as soon as possible to bring the Japanese budget deficit back to balance. With an NGDP growth path of 3% Japanese public debt as a share of GDP would gradually decline in an orderly fashion on such fiscal-monetary framework.

So what Japan needs is not “stimulus” – neither fiscal nor monetary – but rather strict rules both for monetary policy and fiscal policy. The Abe government has the power to ensure that, but I am not optimistic that that will happen.

Earlier posts on Japan:

There is no such thing as fiscal policy – and that goes for Japan as well
The scary difference between the GDP deflator and CPI – the case of Japan
Friedman’s Japanese lessons for the ECB
There is no such thing as fiscal policy – and that goes for Japan as well
Japan shows that QE works
Did Japan have a “productivity norm”?
Japan’s deflation story is not really a horror story

PS even though I am skeptical about the way Shinzo Abe are going about things and I would have much preferred a rule based framework for Japan’s monetary and fiscal policy I nonetheless believe that the Abe government’s push for particularly monetary “stimulus” is likely to spur Japanese growth and is very likely to be good news for a global economy badly in need of higher growth.

Update: Scott Sumner also comments on Japan and it seems like we have more or less the same advise. Here is Scott:

“Just to be clear, my views are somewhere between those of Feldstein and the more extreme Keynesians.  I agree with Feldstein that Japan has big debt problems and big structural problems, and needs to address both.  And that fiscal stimulus is foolish (as even Adam Posen recently argued.)  Unlike Feldstein I also think they have an AD problem that calls for modestly higher inflation and NGDP growth.  At a minimum they should be shooting for 2% to 3% NGDP growth, instead of the negative NGDP growth of the past 20 years.”