Japanese Wartime Economics and Economists

Abstract The Japanese prewar intellectual and policy environment was dominated by officials with law degrees and increasingly by the military. There were important schools of economics, both Marxist, and neoclassical, but their influence was mainly confined to academia. During wartime they suffered severe intellectual repression. The wartime economy relied on an allocation policy led by technocratic planners working under the “reform bureaucrats.” Immediately postwar there was a revival: economists were able to display moral leadership and play a leading role in adapting the MacArthur reforms and devising the formula for modern Japanese growth.