Some observers of Japan blame its monetary policy for failing to react promptly
and aggressively enough, both as asset prices exploded upward in the late 1980s and as
they plummeted afterward. In these accounts, official concerns about the yen’s foreign
exchange rate and the competitiveness of the export sector were significant
considerations for monetary policy. Indeed, the yen has experienced epic gyrations since
the mid-1980s, starting with its rapid ascent after the March 1985 Plaza Accord of major
industrial countries. Two distinct periods of endaka fukyo, or recession induced by a
strong yen, occurred in the late 1980s and the early 1990s at critical phases of the
monetary policy cycle. In general, Japan’s real economic growth rate is rather strongly
negatively correlated with the level of the yen’s real effective exchange rate, as illustrated
in Figure 1. Over 1978-2007, the correlation coefficient between the real exchange rate
and real GDP growth is −0.38.