Tokyo, Feb 15 (EFE).- Germany surpassed Japan’s nominal gross domestic product (GDP) in 2023, pushing the Asian country to the fourth largest economy in the world, the government announced Thursday.

The development followed many years of low growth and deflation as well as a depreciation of the yen.

Japan’s nominal GDP, which measures the GDP evaluated at the current market prices, grew by 5.7 percent in 2023 to stand at 591.5 trillion yen ($3.93 trillion), according to the preliminary report published by the country’s Cabinet Office on Thursday.

On Jan. 15, Germany announced that its nominal GDP for 2023 increased by 6.3 percent year-on-year, to around 4.12 trillion euros ($4.4 trillion), which at current exchange rates displaces Japan as the world’s third largest economy.

The decrease in the size of the economy at the time of conversion is a reflection of the impact of the sharp depreciation of the yen in recent times.

In morning trading at the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Thursday, the yen was traded at between 150.22 and 150.57 to the dollar, and between 161.18 and 161.58 units per euro.

These data underline the fragility of the Japanese economy, a new challenge for the government and the Bank of Japan (BoJ) in their attempt to achieve demand-driven growth, which is lagging amid a loss of real purchasing power, accompanied by wage hikes that are proving insufficient.

Japan’s real GDP grew 1.9 percent year-on-year in 2023, according to the report, a growth that was supported by economic expansion in the country during the first half of the year followed by a contraction in the last two quarters.

Japan’s real GDP fell by 0.1 percent quarter-on-quarter between October and December, after a fall of 0.8 percent between July and September, two quarters of contraction that put the country in a technical recession. EFE

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