Kuala Lampur, Aug. 13 -- For years, the phrase "Japan's Lost Decades" has been invoked as a cautionary tale for China-a prophecy of stagnation, deflation, and demographic decline. A recent research, which analysed Japan's economic development through both expenditure and value-added models using World Bank data, suggests that this narrative is not only incomplete but potentially misleading.

The conventional wisdom is that China is repeating Japan's mistakes: an investment-heavy growth model, a collapsing property bubble, and an aging population that threatens to drag the economy into permanent slowdown. But the findings from the paper point to a more nuanced reality. Japan's "lost decades" were not a period of economic failure - they wer...