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The Asia Century According
to futurologists the most crowded continent must conquer again, within
the next one hundred years, its ancient supremacy.
But many are in doubt
about it can succeed in it Ten years ago many forecasted that the XXI
century would have been labelled Asia: the success of Japan as the second
economic power, the rising of the 'little tigers' of the South East,
the quick transformation of China in a liberalist direction, the slow
wakening of India, the vastness of the oil resources of the countries
around the Persian Gulf, the boundless potential of Siberia as supplier
of commodities, all seemed to foster a move by degrees of the power
barycentre toward the far most crowded continent all over the world.
Much water has flowed under the bridge and those certainties have rather
faded.
The biggest surprise
has been the crisis, already lasting nearly ten years, of Japan, due
outwardly to the great speculative wave involving financial bodies and
industrial corporations, and that highlighted also the lacks of a model
pointed out in the eighties as the most sophisticated version of modern
capitalism.
Japan remains, even
after a ten-year period of troubles, even after the very hard recessionary
period in 1998, the main Asiatic power, but while the American and European
Stock Exchanges are close to the maximum, the Nikkei index is at a point,
lower of almost 60% than the highest ones of ten years ago and the country
seems to have lost that self-assurance that featured it during the boom.
Even if practicing a formally irreproachable democracy, Japanese move
from a political crisis to the following one and seem unable to produce
a leading class able to regenerate the formula, some obsolete, of the
Country-enterprise.
In the last years of
the century, Japan has produced only a leader whose name is reminded
abroad, it had the lowest development rate all over the industrialized
world and - maybe more serious- did not keep the pace with the liberalization
and the innovation processes of the planet.
The “new economy” finds
in the structures of a society till a lot conservative, used to work
by consent more than by breakings-off, a stronger obstacle than other
advanced nations all over the world. By analyst's viewpoint it seems
mainly worrying the fact that Japan, notwithstanding the Keynesian-kind
cure it was submitted by following governments, does not succeed in
leaving the negative spiral; and the suspect that something is going
on bad in the machine that produced the after second world war miracle
starts wafting heavily over markets.
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