Abenomics

Artigo interessante sobre Abe e sua proposta de política econômica.



I missed Barack Obama at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. I listened instead to Shinzo Abe, prime minister of Japan, at the City of London’s Guildhall. I made the right choice.
With his customary eloquence, the US president imagined the world as we would all like it to be. The Japanese prime minister gave a powerful account of what he is actually doing to restore his country’s fortunes.
I have some serious concerns about Mr Abe. His pugnacious nationalism threatens conflict with China. Taiwan used to be seen as the dangerous flashpoint in east Asia. Now is it is the Japanese-controlled and Chinese-claimed Senkaku (in Chinese Diaoyu) islands in the East China Sea. On the issue of the islands, the prime minister has the strong case but his lapses into historical revisionism anger Japan’s neighbours and alarm its allies.
His theme at the Guildhall, though, was Abenomics – and how unprecedented stimulus and radical reform will put Japan back on the economic and geopolitical map. What carried his audience was not so much the detail of the plan, but the unerring conviction.
Here was that rare thing – a politician who sounded as though he really meant it. You don’t hear many leaders declare that their political lives should be dismissed as abject failures if they do not match words with action and promises with results.
Mr Abe has already fired two of the promised three arrows to lift the Japanese economy out of two decades of stagnation. The central bank has been told to print as much money as it takes and fiscal policy has reinforced the expansionary impulse.
It was the third arrow – the modernisation of the economy through supply-side reforms and, critically, an opening up to more international competition – that he focused on at the Guildhall. As far as I could tell, he did not add to the promises already made in areas such as financial services, pharmaceuticals and agricultural trade.
What was striking was the judgment that Japan had failed because it had locked out the world and the unequivocal invitation to his audience to judge him on outcomes. This was a speech entirely devoid of the usual “ifs”, “buts” and let-out clauses. Recalling Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase, Mr Abe pinned his colours to the mast of “Tina” – There is No Alternative.
Fifty years on from John F Kennedy’s immortal “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, Mr Obama was painting on a bigger canvass. He wants another big push to reduce US and Russian stocks of nuclear weapons. And an effort to revive international action to tackle man-made climate change. This was serious stuff, carefully argued. Still it disappointed.
I don’t count myself among those who see Mr Obama’s reluctance to rush into a civil war in Syria as evidence of weakness or dithering. Half a century ago, these critics would probably have been telling president Kennedy to hurry up and bomb the Soviet missile batteries in Cuba. Sometimes the intelligent thing to do is to hold back.
Yet for all that, it is impossible to escape the growing distance between words and actions in Mr Obama’s foreign policy, The president has turned the US into a selective superpower – a measure, many would say, of the new geopolitical reality.
But there is selective and selective. The sense I have is of a White House forever calculating and recalculating the domestic political percentages. It is an approach that militates against risks. But getting things done is always risky. So, as it happens, is doing nothing. It just does not seem so.
Abenomics, of course, could end in failure. The euphoria that greeted the initial measures has been clouded by recent turbulence on financial markets. Japan has taken a leap into the dark.
On his side, Mr Obama could yet surprise us by putting America’s still-unmatchable weight behind the grand ambitions for a safer world. But this week, at least, I was glad that I stayed in London.

Philip Stephens

Fonte: FT