Introduction: Japan as a developing economy

In this book, I analyze postwar Japan’s industrial development within the framework of development economics. In the six decades since the end of World War II, the country has caught-up with the industrial world. During the immediate postwar period, and before the period of rapid economic growth in the 1960s, however, the Japanese economy was that of a developing country. After all, the standard of living in Japan in the 1930s was not even comparable to that of Argentina in the 1930s (Maddison 1995).1