Japan will no longer be a developed country in less than 40 years: Most Powerful Japanese Business Organization

Title: Inviting economic suicide?
Source: The Japan Times
Author: KEVIN RAFFERTY
Date: Wednesday, May 2, 2012

[...] Now it is at least semi-official: Japan’s economy is on the skids. A report just released by a think tank of the Nippon Keidanren, the country’s most powerful business organization, says that by 2050, Japan will no longer be a developed country, predicting years of negative growth from 2030 onward.

“Unless something is done, we are afraid that Japan will fall out of the league of advanced nations and again become a tiny country in the Far East,” says the report in Japanese by the 21st Century Public Policy Institute (21st CPPI), the research institute of Keidanren. […]

Tackling the real issues is complicated by distracting immediate problems exacerbated by the last year’s triple disasters of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown at Fukushima. […]

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda has expressed his determination to get the nuclear plants operating again, warning that the alternative is electricity cuts of up to 20 percent in some areas during Japan’s sweltering sticky summer. But the government’s assertion that the nuclear plants at Oi are “more or less” safe to resume is an object lesson in political folly. […]

Kevin Rafferty, a Hong Kong-based journalist, has reported on the World Bank for 35 years and was managing editor at the bank in 1997-99


Read the full report here…
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/eo20120502a1.html