Japan’s Economic Puzzle

This paper examines Japan’s economic performance in recent years, uncovering a narrative that challenges conventional views. Despite slow productivity growth, Japan maintains the highest economic complexity globally due to its sophisticated export portfolio. The study reveals that while Japan has been experiencing a decline in goods export market shares it has had a rise in services exports, particularly in R&D licensing. Furthermore, Japan has significantly increased its net foreign assets and direct investments abroad, resulting in abnormal high returns. These results put together suggest that Japanese firms —perhaps in reaction to a stagnant domestic labor force—are leveraging their extensive knowledge capital by investing and redeploying resources internationally, which are generating these higher returns. The increasing wealth generated abroad results, we show, in an expansion of non-tradable activities which are less productive, driving down aggregate productivity growth. The paper also highlights concerns over declining innovation quality, posing risks to Japan’s future economic performance and its ability to redeploy its accumulated knowledge to enjoy from unusually high returns from their foreign investments. The findings emphasize the need for policy reforms to enhance Japan’s productivity of non-tradable activities, to reverse the decline in innovation quality and an immigration policy that may change the downward trend in labor supply.