The writer is president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the author of ‘Restoring Japan’s Economic Growth’

Japan really had only one lost decade. There are widely applicable lessons to be learnt from the country’s economic evolution since its bubble burst in 1992. But the lessons from recent years are those of economic policies to emulate, as opposed to the lessons from before 2003 of which to avoid. 

Japanification should be used as shorthand for failure to respond adequately to financial fragility, and being too timid with macroeconomic stimulus. The term certainly fits the Japan of the 1990s, and for that matter, the eurozone of 2010s. As early as 2003, I feared the eurozone would fall into this kind of policy inaction, as to some degree it did. But the current common problems of high-income countries, aptly characterised by Lawrence Summers as secular stagnation, are just that: common problems, not a catching of some Japanese syndrome and not the result of easily rectifiable policy errors.