Watch Japan. Such advice has long been rare, except on “lost decades” or the risks of nuclear power. But for the next 12 months, the world’s third-largest economy promises to be a test case for the whole of the west. And the right neologism will be not “Abenomics” but “labournomics”.

Those who do watch Japan are largely focusing on the wrong thing: deflation and the question of whether massive money-printing by the Bank of Japan — which is, so far, what prime minister Shinzo Abe’s vaunted Abenomics has amounted to — will soon end the country’s years of mildly declining prices. Much more important is what is happening to household incomes. And not just for Japan.

Virtually all western economies have seen wages stagnate or fall in recent years. Economists are struggling to decide whether this is mainly a cyclical consequence of the 2008 financial crisis or whether deeper causes are at play: demography, technology or Chinese competition, all captured by the phrase revived last year by Lawrence Summers, former US Treasury Secretary: “secular stagnation”.