On Wed, 28 Jan 1998, s_sanderson wrote:
> Are people aware that Japan has probably the most egalitarian income
> distribution of all the industrialized countries? (This is in response to the
> claim that Japan pays its workers zip.)
Actually, I said that Japanese multinationals pay their Indonesian and
Thai workers zip -- a bit hyberbolic, of course, since Mitsubishi et. al.
tend to invest long-term and pay better wages than most local businesses
anyway; this is certainly more civilized than the Americans, who
generally invest in other people's credit markets, and not production per
se. But the Japanese model is still problematic to the extent that the
surpluses from overseas production flow back into the Japanese keiretsu;
you get an overaccumulation of industrial facilities and a lack of
effective consumer demand (Americans can't buy all of the world's exports
anymore). Another way of saying the same thing is that most of
the SE Asian countries run big trade deficits vis-a-vis Japan, i.e. import
high-tech production equipment and can't sell enough medium to low-tech
goods to balance their books (which created, in turn, the preconditions
for the speculative influx of cheap foreign credit which led to the bubble
of the Nineties which led to the current credit collapse etc. etc. etc.).
To make a long story short, this is why I think Japan needs to follow the
German strategy, and create an EU-style system of redistribution, low-cost
loans and other forms of capital recycling for the Asian semi-periphery
and periphery. Economically this is doable, because of Japan's $4.3
trillion economy and humongous foreign exchange reserves; it's just a
question of the political implementation.
> Also, Japan's two colonies, Korea and Taiwan (Formosa), are now the most
> industrially advanced countries of the Third World, if they still belong in
> that category (they probably don't).
Maybe semi-periphery is a more descriptive term -- something supported by
the OECD's stats, which put the per capita GDP of Japan, S Korea and
Taiwan at $32,000, $11,000 and $12,000 respectively. This would make
the tigers the Second World of the Pacific Rim economy.
-- Dennis