Toyota cars on the quayside in Singapore
Japan enjoyed decades of manufacturing and export success. Photograph: Charles Pertwee/Bloomberg News

The triple disaster in Japan – earthquake, tsunami, radioactive leaks – has, in addition to the natural human sympathy for the Japanese people, produced an outpouring of forecasts about possible implications for the world economy.

Yet, as the recent, indeed ongoing, financial crisis should have brought to the fore, economics and finance should be the servant of the world, not its master. I've lost count of the number of assessments I have read about the consequences for the Japanese yen, the world "supply chain" (globalisation and "just in time" production can manifest their downsides at times such as this), the future of nuclear power and ordinary power, and policies towards climate change etc.

One striking aspect of the reaction is the frequency with which commentators refer back to 1945, the end of the second world war, and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All this is by way of reminding oneself, and readers unfamiliar with Japan, how vulnerable that country has felt ever since.

Europe benefited from Marshall aid, and from the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (later to become the OECD). Japan also benefited from US reconstruction efforts, and was indeed, under General MacArthur and others, a kind of US satrapy for many years. When, in the late 1970s, I made the first of many visits to Japan, there was a kind of mystique attached by the west to the economy and the people. Having been considered a producer of rather second-rate machines and goods, the economy was gaining admiration for the quality of its products. Into the 1980s, Japan became the envy of the rest of the G7, its ministry of overseas trade being credited with possessing magical powers. "How do the Japanese do it?" was a frequently asked question.

Meanwhile, Japan had been the object of much hostile criticism from the rest of the G7 for its allegedly mercantilist approach to overseas trade; in the US, which had helped to prop it up after the war, Japan became an object of hostility and fear for its perceived economic success.

But Japanese policymakers turned out to have no secret formula. They worked hard, moved from imitation to invention, and supplied the world with many familiar products. And it is arguable that Japanese management techniques, and investment in the UK, was arguably as important as anything done by the Thatcher government in improving Britain's industrial performance after the monetarist devastation of the early 1980s.

Yet Japanese economic policymakers still felt they were running a siege economy, vulnerable to disruption because of the country's paltry endowment of natural resources and dependence on imported oil. Hence the aggressive approach to exporting, to pay for imported energy, and the investment in nuclear energy.

Then came some major macro-economic policy errors. Obvious comparisons are being made with the Kobe earthquake of January 1995 and the remarkable reconstruction effort. But before that there had been an asset price boom whose collapse caused the kind of "balance sheet recession" with which other members of the G7 have become familiar. And the economic policy machine committed the fatal error of almost doubling VAT that year and stifling an economic recovery, thereby making a major contribution to the "lost decade". This was followed by what seemed to be the start of another "lost decade", and all the talk about the chronic sluggishness of the Japanese economy, which persisted right up to this month's events.

Yet it was on a visit to Japan in the late 1990s that I first heard the term "golden recession": decades were being "lost", but at a high standard of living.

Which brings me to one of many interesting points made by the retiring president of the Bundesbank, Dr Axel Weber, in a speech in London recently to the annual dinner of the Society of Business Economists.

Having had some fun with the contrast between German and UK growth and inflation in 2010 – German growth 3.5%, inflation 1.25%; UK growth 1.25%, inflation 3.5% – he then tried to cool some of the German euphoria, urging his audience to be suspicious of "growth numbers" and look at "levels". Germany would not be back to pre-crisis levels until the end of 2011, he added. "It's not a success story. It's three lost years." Then came the killer line: "The long-term trend rate of growth for the German economy is 1%. That's not a dynamic driver of the European economy."

This brings us back to the economy and finance as the servant of the people. In Nomura's comprehensive report "Europe Will Work", John Llewellyn and Peter Westaway remind us, in the midst of emergency meetings about the eurozone, that "it was known at its inception that the euro area had design flaws, including a lack of fiscal union, and no mechanisms to deal with asymmetric shocks or diverging competitiveness. However, political factors trumped economic concerns and thereby… the single currency was at root a political project."

They think the political will is there to resolve the crisis. One of their charts shows how German export competitiveness has benefited, vis-a-vis Italy and others, within the eurozone. The question is can some of the peripheral states stand the strain of Germany's strict conditions for help?