ABSTRACT
The Japanese economy had experienced rapid growth in the 1960s and successfully made a transition from a developing economy to a highly industrialized economy by the end of the 1970s. The East Asian countries had experienced rapid growth under the progress of economic globalization since the late 1980s, and some have reached the stage of upper middle income countries. The recent concern of those East Asian upper middle income countries is the risk of being trapped at the middle income level and not being able to move up to the stage of high income countries. The Japanese economy was not caught by this “middle income trap”1 in its growth process, although it naturally faced side e ects of growth.
