NYTimes: Japan Slows Down, but Not Its Road Builders
Highway construction here once enjoyed wide popular support as a way to spread Tokyo’s wealth and to reduce rural isolation and poverty in this California-sized nation. But in recent years, road construction projects have taken on the air of government make-work programs, intended to disguise Japan’s growing unemployment.
In fact, Japan has spent trillions of dollars in the 1990′s in an effort to build its way back to economic growth. But instead it finds itself today deep in recession and saddled with daunting construction bills Û the world’s largest government debt and an annual deficit that increased fivefold in the last decade.
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Still, critics say, Japan is littered with public works projects built with little concern about profitability. From heroes of development, construction company presidents have became villains of economic stagnation, and are accused today of building bridges and bullet trains to nowhere.
“We are starting to look like medieval Spain, wasting our money on useless things,” grumbled Hideaki Mizuno, an investment banker in Tokyo. “We need to use market mechanisms to allocate money.”