日本持续了20年的负增长，为什么保持世界第三的经济体？

迷茫的维修

Well, “third largest” sounds nice, as if Japan was anywhere near the US, the EU, or China, but the above chart should put that myth in perspective.

To answer your question: Japan is the leader of the “threshold countries”, or if one want to express it a little more pointedly: “Among the blind the one-eyed is king”. The reason they are still in 3rd place is simply because not enough time has passed for the emerging countries to overtake them. They even - somewhat unbelievably - managed to go to 2nd place, with fears that they could someday overtake the US and take #1, but that never happened, because the economic miracle had not enough substance to support itself. China easily overtook them, and they went back to #3. And look that big of a gap between China and Japan exists now.

They should expect to be overtaken by more and more countries soon. India is growing fast. Germany could also overtake them, as they’re following closely behind (in the chart above, Germany is counted towards EU, that’s why they don’t show up.)

What’s more, Germany is going to overtake Japan with about half the population (!) - that paints a crass picture of work ethics and efficiency in Japan.

Japan was granted a huge economy by the US to build a wall against communism (for a more detailed answer, read this: Martin Basinger's answer to Why has Japan's economy fared so poorly since the 90s but Germany's grown robustly?

Japan is still managing to hold 3rd place because it’s living off the past. But that 3rd place is deceptive - it’s a very close race and while Japan has no positives to look forward to, most of its competitors do.