Japan slips into recession, becoming the 4th-largest economy, behind the US, China and now Germany.
Japan’s economy is now the world’s fourth-largest after it contracted in the last quarter of 2023 and fell behind Germany.
The government reported the economy shrank at an annual rate of 0.4% in October to December, according to Cabinet Office data on real GDP, though it grew 1.9% for all of 2023.
It contracted 2.9% in July-September. Two straight quarters of contraction are considered an indicator an economy is in a technical recession.
Japan’s economy was the second largest until 2010, when it was overtaken by China’s. Japan’s nominal GDP totaled $4.2 trillion last year, while Germany’s was $4.4 trillion, or $4.5 trillion, depending on the currency conversion.
“We have declining birthrates and extremely strict immigration rules.”
“Why is our economy failing?”
You know not everything is a problem of too little or too much immigration…
What? Yeah except I’m not talking about everything I’m talking about the economy. Dying countries have low immigration and Japan’s self-imposed rules are pushing it into a recession because a lack of human workers leads to a weak workforce.
But I’d love to hear your theory on why Japan has fallen behind Germany.
It’s ridiculous. My friend married a Japanese woman and they had a boy. If the boy wasn’t born in Japan, he wouldn’t be a Japanese citizen in the future. Meanwhile, his Mexican father can’t aspire to be a Japanese, even if his whole family is and they have been married for years.
Is even more ridiculous for people like this boy, since their double nationality rules are kind of weird to me. Whatever, it’s just nuts.
Truth is they are both going down at a different pace.
Germany just passed a €72 billion defense budget. As they say: “When the economy is sore, join a war.”
Did you miss the developments in Eastern Europe that necessitate this increase in spending?
No. Just pointing out that military spending is a very efficient way to increase economic activity. The US economy would not be doing very well if it wasn’t for all the military spending.
But Germany is doing it without putting it all on the big credit card like the Americans, so I’ll take Germany’s economy and well-advised budgeting any day of the week.
But their public transport sucks.
I wish Canadian public transport sucked as much as Germany’s
Still much better than global average… Germany is probably in the top 10% of countries with the best public transport.
It still amazes me that a country that small with that little natural resource as Germany can have such a strong and big economy!
Our resource used to be people, but we’re in the process of completely fucking that up. Education going downhill quickly, rapidly aging population paired with a massive push against immigration, the most important jobs having some of the worst pay and working conditions…
We’re in a race to the bottom. Japan mas have overtaken us, but we’re folfowing closely behind.
I can’t tell if you’re talking about Germany or the US. It’s believable either way.
And yet they complain that our economy is in shambles. It’s never enough for these capitalist ghouls.
My thoughts exactly. Why does this even matter?
I bet being poor is a better life in Japan than being poor in any of the “top three” countries.
excuse me? I’d argue that being poor in Germany is a better life than being “working class” in Japan
The Japanese have universal health care so the homeless get help including mental health help. They have housing programs for the homeless, job training for the homeless, direct food care, the government pays businesses to hire people so their wages are subsidized.
https://www.studycountry.com/wiki/does-japan-have-a-homeless-problem
My dude that sounds very ideal and humane.
That’s actually a really tough call between US and JP. I lived out of my car in the US for a while. I’ve not been homeless in Japan, but they do tend to have it rather rough from what I’ve seen.
In Japan you should not be seen if you’re homeless
There’s a reason their streets look so clean and part of that is forcing the homeless away
If you look up homelessness in Japan then you should be able to find “the unclean” parts of the cities
