Japan

NYT Isn't Sure Whether Abenomics Has Led to a Shortage of Workers or a Shortage of Jobs, but It Wants Readers to Think It's Bad  by Dean Baker

It is likely that many readers thought these numbers are annual growth rates. As such, these would be indeed be low. However, they are in fact quarterly growth rates. Even after the downward revision Japan's economy would still have been growing at a 1.2 percent annual rate in the third quarter. Since Japan's population is shrinking at a 0.1 percent annual rate, while the U.S. population is growing at a 0.7 percent rate, this means that even in this relatively weak quarter (which followed two quarters of strong growth), Japan's per capita growth rate exceeded the U.S. growth rate over the last three years. Readers who thought these numbers referred to annual growth rates would not be aware of that fact.