Japan needs to continue banking reform and corporate restructuring to achieve sustained economic recovery, the International Monetary Fund said in a report released Tuesday.
The report, titled "Post-Bubble Blues," describes how Japan responded to various problems that arose after the easy-money, speculation-driven bubble economy burst in the early 1990s.
The IMF termed what Japan suffered after the bubble collapsed as "a recession of a depth and duration virtually unprecedented for a major industrial country since the end of World War II."
Banking-sector problems have put significant downward pressure on economic activity throughout the 1990s and this has blurred the impact of stimulus monetary policy, it said.