While estimates by the Bank's Research and Statistics Department and the Cabinet Office each suggest that Japan's output gap is positive, the IMF's estimates for Japan are negative, even for 2017, according to the World Economic Outlook Database April 2018, available on the IMF website: https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2018/01/weodata/index.aspx.
Momentum at the multilateral level under the GATT process had been slowing, and the two new  -7agreements were intended to maintain the pace at the regional level.7 They had a major impact on our exports, which grew strongly in volume and as a share of GDP (Chart 5).8 The agreements provided privileged access, and thereby increased exposure to, the United States during the 1990s (Chart 6), when it was one of the fastestgrowing economies in the world (Chart 7).