Change and crisis in the Japanese banking industry

For more than ten years Japan has seemed unable to overcome the repeated sequence of mild recessions followed by periods of stagnation. An average real growth rate of approximately 1 per cent per year between 1991 and 2001 was the lowest among advanced industrial countries. Negative growth rates, falling individual consumption, historically high unemployment and fast growing public debt have stood in such a sharp contrast with relatively stable performance before the 1980s, that Japanese often call the 1990s their ‘lost decade’.