Richard Katz
Richard Katz is Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics In International Affairs, the New York correspondent for Weekly Toyo Keizai, a leading Japanese business magazine, and formerly the editor of The Oriental Economist Report, a monthly newsletter on Japan.
Mr. Katz has taught about Japan’s economy as an Adjunct Associate Professor at the New York University Stern School of Business, and as a Visiting Lecturer in Economics at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook.
Mr. Katz is the author of two books on Japan's economic travails and has just finished a third book on reviving entrepreeurship in Japan.
His first book was Japan: The System That Soured--The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Economic Miracle (M.E. Sharpe 1998). A Japanese edition was published in 1999 under the title Kusariyuku Nihon To Iu System (Toyo Keizai Shimposa). The book received favorable reviews from such publications as the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Asahi Shimbun, Toyo Keizai, The Japan Quarterly, The Journal of Japanese Studies and the Far Eastern Economic Review, among others. Toyo Keizai named it "one of the 20 books needed to understand the 21st century."
In 2002, his second book was published, entitled Japanese Phoenix: The Long Road to Economic Revival (M.E. Sharpe) in English and Fushicho no Nihon Keizai (Toyo Keizai) in Japanese. It also received favorable reviews. Both books have been widely used in university courses.
He has testified several times about Japan and Asia to Congressional committees. He has frequently been invited to meet with senior officials in both the US and Japanese governments to provide analysis. In the year 2000, he served on the Council of Foreign Relations' Task Force on the Japanese economy. He regularly lectures at universities and conferences.
Mr. Katz’s essays have been published by Foreign Affairs, The Washington Quarterly, The International Economy Magazine, Current History, Challenge and The American Prospect. Op‑eds have appeared in such papers as the New York Times, London Financial Times, Asian Wall Street Journal, Asahi Evening News, Christian Science Monitor and the Investors Business Daily. He is the author of the article on the Japanese economy in the Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia. Mr. Katz's comments on Japan are frequently quoted in major publications, including the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, London Economist, London Financial Times, Chicago Tribune, Time Magazine International, Newsweek International, and the San Jose Mercury, and he has been interviewed on CNN, The PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Marketplace, Bloomberg TV, and BBC's The World.
Having received his B.A. degree in History from Columbia University in 1973, Mr. Katz went on to obtain his M.A. in Economics at New York University (NYU) in 1996.
Japan will eventually reform and revive. Its tragedy is that it is filled with smart, ambitious, creative individuals who are trapped in once vibrant but now ossified political and economic institutions. The whole is so much less than the sum of its parts. The country will revive when it finally undertakes the necessary institutional overhaul. But that takes a visionary leader; Shinzo Abe is not that leader.
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Japan’s economy could not recover without structural reform and structural reform would not occur until the emergence of genuinely contested elections.
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The Koizumi economic boom would not last; there was less economic reform than analysts claimed
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The JGB market would not crash (several times over the past decade or so when stories about imminent crashes emerged)
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There would be no run on the banks in 2003
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The rescue of Resona Bank in 2003 was the beginning of a real change toward solving the nonperforming loan crisis
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The “decoupling” theory popular in 2006-07 was wrong and a recession in the US would cause a horrific recession in Japan, as it did in 2008-09
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The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) would lose power if it passed the consumption tax
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All of Japan’s nuclear plants would end up being shut down in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster
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China would not intentionally use military force to take Senkaku Islands and would pull back on economic pressure because it needs Japan just as much as Japan needs China
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While the Koizumi boom did peter out, as predicted in 7b, it took longer to occur than I had predicted
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The DPJ would gain a single-seat majority in the Upper House in the 2010 elections (made shortly after the DPJ’s big Lower House win in 2009
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The DPJ would not pass the consumption tax out of fear of losing power
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The 2009 DPJ victory meant the emergence of a genuine two-party system in Japan (hinged on prediction a being correct) and, if the DPJ won the 2013 Lower House election, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) disappearing
Foreseeing the direction of events is one thing; timing is a lot harder
A Question on Japan's Food Prices
A fellow-reader wrote in with a question that probably a number of you have:
View postWhy Chinese-Japanese Economic Relations Are Improving
In this article on the Foreign Affairs website, Japan expert and EconVue contributor Richard Katz argues that China has been delinking an increasingly softer stance on economic ties with Japan, even as political ties between the two countries between increasingly brittle.
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