This chapter argues that the public discourse’s obsession with whether the current course of Japan’s fiscal policy, due to the massive bulk of its public debts, will eventually run into a fiscal crisis widely misses the point. The genuine question to us is the constitutional problem: the ongoing fiscal-monetary policy regime is already amounting to the re-configuration of the fiscal constitution, which must be done via an honest discussion and clear choice by the democratic polity. The public discourse over the current fiscal-monetary policy regime, on both sides of the debate, pays little attention to its constitutional significance, hence dismantling the democratic accountability mechanism on fiscal/monetary matters. In the author’s view, this amounts to the true “fiscal crisis.”
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Front Matter
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Part I: How people think about crisis
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Part II: The Great East Japan Earthquake and associated crises
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Part III: Law and institutions in the response to crisis
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Part IV: International perspectives
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Back Matter
