Economic policies and growth strategies after the crisis: different approaches in USA, Japan and EU

The objective of this paper is to investigate how the United States of America (US) and Japan managed relatively better than Europe to emerge from from the crisis, which caused a deep recession in 2009, and why instead Europe or more appropriately, the Euro Area (EA) of the European Union (EU), did not. I will examine the main policies implemented by the main fiscal and monetary authorities in the US, i.e., the Federal Reserve (Fed), and the Federal Government; in Japan: the Bank of Japan (BoJ) and the Japanese Government (focusing in particular on the so called “Abenomics”); and in Europe: the European Central Bank (ECB) and EA Member State Governments; and I will try to understand how in the US and Japan these policies caused sustainable recovery in terms of GDP growth and employment, while on the other hand they did not manage to bring about the same results in Europe. The paper will also propose a political agenda for the EA which would favour economic recovery and sustainable development in the next decade, similar to that witnessed by the other two countries (we refer to the Euro Area as a country, at least from an economic point of view, despite the strong weakness of this definition from a political point of view). In this context, the case of Japan (with the so called “Abenomics”), along with the recovery strategy embarked in the US are better examples that Europe should follow.