By the end of September last year, Japan was in debt to such an extent that readers will be stunned to hear this amount of debt, and what is surprising is that this debt burden will not stop here but will continue to increase in the future. .
The total volume of loans to Japan has reached 9.2 trillion US dollars, which is 266 percent of Japan’s GDP.
This amount of debt is the highest among the major economies of the world.
For example, if we look at the size of US debt compared to Japan, it is 31 trillion dollars, but this amount is equal to only 98% of the total GDP of the US.
The journey of reaching such a large amount of debt is not a few years, but it has taken many decades to increase the burden of loans taken in the struggle to keep the country’s economy running and meet the expenses.
Businesses, which play a key role in Japan’s civic and economic development, are reluctant to borrow while the state often forces them to spend.
Takeshi Tashiro, a non-resident senior fellow at the Patterson Institute for International Economics, says people save a lot on their own but don’t tend to invest in the market in comparison.
According to him, one of the main reasons for this problem is the aging of the population in Japan, which increases the government’s spending on social security and health services. Most of Japan’s population faces a lot of uncertainty about their future after retirement and therefore prefer personal savings.
However, despite this large volume of loans, the surprising thing is that international investors trust Japan for investment.
Japan’s debt burden began to rise in the early 1990s when its financial system and real estate bubble burst, with disastrous results. And at the same time, Japan’s debt ratio was only 39 percent of its GDP. Due to this situation, the revenue of the government decreased while on the other hand the expenditure started to increase.
Within a few years, by the year 2000, Japan’s debt burden had risen to 100 percent of its GDP, which doubled by 2010.