Summary and policy implications
In this paper, we presented data on recent trends in private consumption and in possible
determinants of private consumption (such as GDP, household incomes, household saving
rates, household wealth, and employment conditions) in the G7 countries and found that
there has been significant variability among the Group of Seven (G7) countries not only in
their private consumption growth rates but also in the determinants of private consumption
growth during the 2002–2007 period, with the relative importance of GDP growth, household
income growth, household saving rates, household wealth, and employment conditions
varying from country to country.
With respect to Japan, we found that private consumption has been relatively stagnant
during the 2002–2007 period and that the stagnation of private consumption has been due
to the stagnation of household income and of household wealth and the relative stability of
the household saving rate.
This suggests that the best way of stimulating private consumption and of bringing
about a recovery of the Japanese economy as a whole would be to boost household income
and household wealth. However, given that Japan’s government debt is already dangerously
high (in excess of 200 percent of GDP, making Japan’s government debt the highest among
the developed countries as a ratio of GDP) and that there is little scope for further monetary
easing, it seems that targeted policies would be more realistic and more effective than
macroeconomic policies. For example, policies that redistribute income toward the lowincome
and others with high marginal propensities to consume, such as policies that create
more job opportunities and more opportunities for vocational training for young workers
(whose unemployment rates are still very high) and policies that improve thewages and other
benefits and working conditions of part-time and temporary workers (whose share has been
increasing),would be effective in boosting private consumption and the economy as awhole.
Finally, since we found that the stability of household saving rates is a contributing
factor to the stagnation of private consumption in Japan, improving social safety nets and
improving access to consumer credit would also boost private consumption by reducing
precautionary saving (see Horioka and Yin (2010) and Horioka and Terada-Hagiwara (2012) for cross-country evidence on the impact of social safety nets and consumer credit
on household saving and consumption).
The author hopes that these policy measures will be adopted as soon as possible
so that private consumption as well as the Japanese economy as a whole can receive a
boost, enabling it to extricate itself from two “lost decades” of stagnant growth and high
unemployment.