The International Competitiveness Indexes and the Structural Reforms in Japan*

The Purpose of the article is to determine the directions of the optimization of national efforts to overcome the structural problems of Russia to transit to the Industry 4.0 economic order taking into consideration the Japanese experience accumulated in the last decades and the information of indexes international competitiveness. The relevance of the theme is due to the universal character of such a structural problem and thus to the opportunities for Russia to apply to the attempts of Japan to resolve them being the country one of world leaders as well as to make use of the international competitiveness indexes for the same purpose. These were analyzed with the respective dynamics of their values for Japan compared with the national policy to overcome the structural problems. It proved these problems and the policy to overcome them to be poorly reflected by the indexes pretending the latter to show a positive situation of the national economy of the last decades. The indexes did not reflect the hidden contradictions of the economic structure fraught finally for the national competitiveness. Under such circumstances, the State was to seek the ways to form a new economic structure ignoring the index instruments. This conclusion resulted valuable to resolve the similar problems in Russia. The unfinished search of Japan for a structural problem solutions made one to consider the difficulties to implement such a policy not to repeat its mistakes. Meanwhile the positive evaluation of the economic situation in Japan presented by the international competitiveness indexes proved it necessary to treat them cautiously since these didn’t reflect the risks to conserve the elder production structure with the consequent loss of leadership.

the Global Competitiveness Index of World Economic Forum, the Competitive Industrial Performance Index of UNIDO, The Global Manufacturing Competitiveness Index, BCG Global Manufacturing Cost-Competitiveness Index, Abenomics, the Global Competitiveness Index of World Economic Forum, the Competitive Industrial Performance Index of UNIDO, The Global Manufacturing Competitiveness Index, BCG Global Manufacturing Cost-Competitiveness Index, Abenomics

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