By Kumiharu Shigehara
Japan‘s economic expansion stumbled by late 2007, and in the context of the global economic crisis, it has been trapped in the deepest recession of the post-war era. Initially, the impact of the global crisis on the Japanese economy was expected to be limited because Japanese banks and other financial institutions were relatively insulated from financial turmoil. However, between the third quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of this year, Japan’s exports fell at an annual rate of some 55 per cent in volume terms, the sharpest among OECD countries and double the area’s average rate of decline.
