Auto Motor Show Girls, Japan

Economy
From 1868, the Meiji period launched economic expansion. Meiji rulers embraced the concept of a market economy and adopted British and North American forms of free enterprise capitalism. Japanese studied overseas and Western scholars were hired to teach in Japan. Many of today's enterprises were founded at the time, and Japan emerged as the most developed nation in Asia.
The period of overall real economic growth from the 1960s to the 1980s has been called a "Japanese miracle": it averaged 7.5 percent in the 1960s and 1970s, and 3.2 percent in the 1980s and early 1990s. Growth slowed markedly in the 1990s during what the Japanese call the Lost Decade, largely because of the after-effects of the Japanese asset price bubble and domestic policies intended to wring speculative excesses from the stock and real estate markets. Government efforts to revive economic growth met with little success and were further hampered by the global slowdown in 2000. The economy showed strong signs of recovery after 2005. GDP growth for that year was 2.8 percent, with an annualized fourth quarter expansion of 5.5 percent, surpassing the growth rates of the US and European Union during the same period.