ABSTRACT
The proponents of the multipole world theory took heart from Japan's successes then and announced that Western cultural values were on the wane. In the 1950s, the government began to subsidize Japanese companies which preferred to purchase Japanese-made equipment, the amount of the subsidies constituting up to a half of the purchased equipment's worth. The Japanese overestimated the Western market's potential for absorbing their products. The Japanese economic model maintained high growth rates for a long time using extensive methods. Japanese financial institutions owned 25-40 percent of those countries' and their leading companies' debt securities. Pressure on the real estate and stocks market in the second half of the 1980s triggered a boom which, as the subsequent developments showed, spelt an end to the Japanese economic miracle. The Japanese government is trying to emerge from the deepening economic crisis through more active crediting or even direct financing of industrial production.
