The economic outlook in Japan is very grim, as these brief overviews (links below) indicate. Right now, Japan has the worst growth outlook in Asia. That is a surprising fact, if one recalls that this is a country presumably dusting itself off from the collapse of its own bubble nearly two decades ago. After such a long period of economic crisis, Japan should be renovated and ready to thrive. But instead, it may be in worse shape than even the US (though clearly not Iceland and much of Eastern Europe). Japanese financial institutions were not big players in the CDOs, CDSs and the other toxic assets that have ravaged the capital bases of banks in the US and much of Europe. Rather, Japan's key policy failure would appear to be over-reliance on exports as the engine of growth, while hoping that the fruits of this growth would trickle down into the rest of the economy and bolster demand. But in the rest of the economy, deregulation of labour and other markets had seen firms shifting to insecure employment (especially part-time and contractual staff) and rolling back pay, thus crimping the level of demand. And that weak domestic demand was of course blunting domestic-oriented businesses' incentives to invest (cf. export-oriented businesses' incentives to invest). With the startling 35% drop in exports in December 2008, it's as if someone kicked the chair away from a man who was standing on one to test out what it felt like to have a noose around his neck.