Did Japan make a contribution to World War II way out of proportion to its nominal relative GDP?
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According to a different set of GDP estimates (which are PPP-adjusted to facilitate cross-national comparisons), Japan's economy is roughly in proportion to @TomAu's estimates of Japan's martial contributions.
For example Tom estimates that Japan contributed more to the war effort than Italy. In every year of the war, Wikipedia estimates that Japan had a larger GDP than Italy. Tom estimates that Japan's contribution was roughly half of Germany's. According to Wikipedia, Japan's GDP was a little under half of Germany's throughout the war. The relative contributions of the Axis powers therefore seem to be fairly proportionate to economic power.
Admittedly, Japan had a much smaller economy than the UK or US. Japan's economy was about a 1/5 of the American economy--but war needs consumed only a 1/3 of American industrial output while Japan devoted nearly all of its heavy industry to military needs. Divide American GDP by 3 and the number is still larger than Japan's GDP, but by much less. Similarly, the UK's enormous GDP is inflated by the colonies, but these were never going to provide heavy industry comparable to the homeland. Looking at just Britain, the UK's GDP is 50% larger than Japan's. Again, assuming that Japan devoted a larger percentage of its industrial resources to military production than did the UK, then their military contributions are roughly proportionate to their economies.
In this sense, Japan was similar to the USSR, another power that (militarily) punched above its (economic) weight. But it's no secret how the USSR did this: Stalin used the powers of the state to turn the Soviet economy toward a complete focus on military production, uprooting entire industries and hundreds of thousands of workers to Siberia. Germany didn't even devote its entire industrial output to military production until 1943.
In short: Among the Axis powers, Japan's military contribution was roughly proportionate to its economy. The fact that it "outperformed" its economy relative to the Allied powers (other than the USSR) is in part due to the fact that the Japanese government devoted a higher proportion of its economic resources to military production than did the US or UK.
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