Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to investigate how economic policy has developed in Japan since 1980s and to clarify differences between economic policy from the latter half of 1980s to the former half of 1990s and that since the latter half of 1990s. The former type of economic policy package called "structural adjustment policy" aims at an expanding equilibrium of a trade balance of Japan and relaxation of trade conflicts with Europe and America by means of expansion of domestic demand, public investment in particular. On the other hand, the goal of the latter type called "structural reform policy" is not to balance import with export but to realize an optimum allocation of resources from a global view. "Structural reform policy" has been formed up as policy package during the middle of the 1990s under the Hashimoto Cabinet and has been executed on the full scale during the former half of the 2000s under the Koizumi Cabinet. The Koizumi Cabinet promoted deregulation without exception in order to substitute goods and services provided by low productivity sectors for goods imported or services provided by foreign-affiliated companies and in order to open in an official market to tertiary industries, service industries in particular. In addition, Japan Highway Public Corporation and Japan Post have been privatized and the system of the Fiscal Investment and Loan Program has been reformed related to these privatizations. It is reasonable to suppose that the drastic change from "structural adjustment policy" to "structural reform policy" on a superstructural level has been caused by some structural conversion in Japanese economy on a substructural level. We can find three aspects of its structural conversion as the background of the economic policy transformation. Firstly, its overseas local production ratio has increased rapidly in the manufacturing industry. In consequence, its economic policy has come to give more weight to control of capital account balance than that of trade balance. Secondly, the number of the service industry workers has surpassed that of the manufacturing industry. As a result, the service industry has come to acquire great influence over policy formation as the examples of the privatization of public corporations and the opening in an official market show. Finally, in a structure of financial surplus or deficits by sector, non-financial corporations have turned from a deficit sector to a surplus one. During the 1990s the financial sector could invest its fund in government bonds, but the Koizumi Cabinet launched a reduction of public investment and so-called fiscal reconstruction became a subject of discussion. Such conditions around the financial sector cause the privatization of public corporations and reform of the Fiscal Investment and Loan Program, which newly provide financial corporations with promising fields for investment as a substitute of the existing private-sector capital spending and public works.
