ABSTRACT
The greater progress of American women in obtaining access to economic opportunity could provide lessons for Japan and Korea, and these nations' creative experiments with affordable housing could be considered in the United States. The housing starts of both the United States and Japan took a nearly equivalent hit in 1991—in Japan, due to the collapse of its bubble, and in the United States, to recession. Jim Crotty argued that the global macroeconomic environment has, in the postwar period, shifted from largely socially or state-managed economies to market-guided economies. The cases of Japan and South Korea illustrate the difficulty of sustaining macroeconomic growth under neoliberalism. Housing expenditures, starts, and sales are all important indicators of macroeconomic activity, both current and future. In the United States, too, many women have entered the labor force in response to the increasing gap between income and housing cost, as Isenberg and Byun document.
