Redesign for a Competitive Future

Abstract

Japan’s decade of economic problems and the massive redesign of Japan’s businesses are a direct result of Japan’s amazing economic success since the mid-1950s. In 1955 Japan’s economy was half the size of the economies of France and Britain with per capita output well under that even of Italy. Over the next 40 years the economy grew in US dollar terms by 230 times, becoming by 1995 more than three times the size of the French economy and more than four times the size of the British economy, second in the world to the United States. On a per capita basis Japanese output in 1995 was half again as great as that of the United States. The advance from the poverty of the immediate postwar years to real wealth in so short a time by a major nation has no precedent in world history.