The World Bank and Japan

Pressure from Japan led the World Bank to produce its 1993 policy study The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy. Japan’s original intent was to preserve Japanese freedom of action as its government and businesses set out to create a better environment for industrial policy in Asia. But as a result of the Asian financial crisis that began in 1997 and Japan’s aid to the stricken economies, Japan succeeded in fundamentally changing the global policy agenda based on neoclassical economics.