The consequences of the 2008 financial crisis on the Japanese economy

This bachelor thesis is primarily aimed at identifying the impact of the global financial crisis of 2008 on the Japanese real economy, especially on the foreign trade volume, production in the automobile, machinery, electrical equipment, and iron and steel industries, unemployment rate and examining the economic stimulus undertaken by the Japanese government as well as monetary policy conducted by the Bank of Japan in response to the global financial crisis. There are three main chapters in my thesis. The first part, theoretical, contains general information concerning the global crisis of 2008, the main causes of its occurrence, its rapid spread in the world and its influence in Japan, which was already in recession for the lost decades. The information will be used to review both the preconditions for the sudden escalation from a market-housing crisis to a global financial crisis and the role the US government and the Federal Reserve played in this story. The second part of my paper focuses directly on the consequences of the crisis on different areas of the Japanese economy. In the first subchapter, I demonstrate the impact of the 2008 financial crisis on Japanese overseas trade. In the subsequent subchapter, I explore the different industries that were most affected by the events. The last subchapter focuses on the unemployment rate and its comparison with pre-crisis and post-crisis indicators based on the data gathered. The concluding part of the thesis will include the analysis of the Japanese state's response taken as a reaction to this downturn on the basis of the data research methods. The first sub-chapter will include the analysis of the government's fiscal policy, while the second sub-chapter will be focused on the monetary policy implemented by the Bank of Japan to help the real sector to cope with the crisis.