Review: The Great Transformation of Japanese Capitalism ed. by Sébastien Lechevalier
In The Great Transformation of Japanese Capitalism, Sébastien Lechevalier writes that “the ambition of this book is to offer a very different account from what is usually accepted about the trajectory of [the] Japanese economy since the early 1980s” (p. 158). He notes that until the end of the 1980s, the performance of Japan’s economy was regarded as clearly superior to those of the United States and Europe. However, the dominant viewpoint today is that Japan is inescapably on a downward slope. Lechevalier states that from a neo-liberal viewpoint, the stagnation of the Japanese economy is caused by the failure of the Japanese socioeconomic system to adapt to a new global and technological environment. He challenges this neo-liberal view, however, arguing that the neo-liberal solution to the Japanese economic crisis is, in fact, one of the causes of the problems that Japan has faced over the past thirty years.