It should be noted here that declining property prices greatly aggravated the balance sheet adjustments of Japanese corporations, as will be explained later. The US case is illustrated in Figure 2.2. In the United States also, an increasing inverse dependency ratio seems to have coincided with the property bubble.
After the bubble burst of 2007, property prices seem to have followed the long run movement of the inverse dependency ratio, although it would be premature to draw any conclusions from this at the moment. How about the European experience? Figure 2.3 shows the situation in Ireland.