In this outstanding book, Steven J. Ericson challenges the view that the Matsukata Deflation represented a form of shock therapy that replaced an activist Meiji Japanese industrial policy with financial orthodoxy and a laissez-faire reliance on markets to reach developmental goals. In Ericson's view, Matsukata's reforms were a pragmatic blend of economic ideas that might be called “liberal nationalist” and policies of “expansionary austerity,” and we should be wary of neoliberal attempts to turn Meiji economic development into a success story for market fundamentalism (pp. 141–42).
Finance Minister Matsukata Masayoshi is frequently portrayed in English-language histories of Japan as a convert to laissez-faire economics and nineteenth-century financial orthodoxy, but Ericson argues that Matsukata saw economic policy as a means to nationalist ends rather than in ideological terms. Although Matsukata credited Léon Say, the French liberal economist, as a major inspiration, Ericson demonstrates that Matsukata's economic thinking had many different sources....
