Dry Rot: The Corruption of General Subsidies in Japan

Within a few short years, Japan's over ¥20 trillion system of general subsidies has gone from being a sacred cow to a salient item on a menu of reforms. This development reflects the rise of reformist forces, notably Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro, and their critique of the Liberal Democratic Party old guard's extraordinary mismanagement of the Japanese economy. The delegitimation of general subsidies has, however, a longer trajectory as well. It derives from excessive fiscal centralization and the spread of wasteful subsidies throughout the intergovernmental fiscal system. Japan's extensive fiscal reforms in the mid-1980s anticipated a very different scenario. They saw the expansion of general subsidies and locally initiated public works as important means for overcoming the clearly debilitating politics of specific subsidies. What was generally overlooked was the great scope for moral hazard that the reforms entailed. And no one could have foreseen the 1990s, when the central government increasingly force-fed the locals public-works funding as part of its fiscal policy. This paper therefore retraces the political economy of Japan's general subsidy regime and its increasing delegitimation through pork-barrel incentives. It also sketches the current debate over how to reform the system.