The Ministry That Built Japan’s Economy
An effective economic bureaucracy guided Japan from the ruin of war to becoming the world’s second-largest economy within a few decades. Succession failure has since led to its and Japan’s decline.
The Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) of Japan is tasked with stewarding the strength and international competitiveness of Japanese industry. With a nominal GDP of $4.2 trillion as of 2023, Japan’s economy is the fourth-largest in the world after only the United States, China, and Germany, as well as the fourth-largest manufacturing economy after the same three.1 Like other large countries, Japan’s diverse industrial base primarily supplies its own domestic market of over 120 million people. But Japan also exports key high-tech goods like semiconductor manufacturing machines and gas turbines, as well as large amounts of automobiles, chemicals, plastics, steel, and more. Most of the growth of this economy occurred under the careful stewardship of METI from the aftermath of World War II to the 1980s, then known as the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), and which, for decades, wielded enormous power over industrial and economic matters in post-war Japan.