The was a long-term economic development plan initiated by Japanese prime minister

Hayato Ikeda was a Japanese bureaucrat and later politician who served as Prime Minister of Japan from 1960 to 1964. He is best known for his Income Doubling Plan, which promised to double Japan's GDP in ten years. Ikeda is also known for repairing U.S.-J ...

in the fall of 1960. The plan called for doubling the size of Japan's economy in ten years through a combination of tax breaks, targeted investment, an expanded social safety net, and incentives to increase exports and industrial development. To achieve the goal of doubling of the economy in ten years, the plan called for an average annual economic growth rate of 7.2%. In fact, Japan's annual growth averaged more than 10% over the course of the Plan, and the economy doubled in size in less than seven years. __NOTOC__ Ikeda introduced the Income Doubling Plan in response to the massive Anpo protests in 1960 against the US-Japan Security Treaty, as part of an effort to shift Japan's national dialogue away from contentious political struggles toward building a consensus around pursuit of rapid economic growth. However, Ikeda and his brain trust, which most notably included the economist

Osamu Shimomura was a Japanese organic chemist and marine biologist, and Professor Emeritus at Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and Boston University School of Medicine. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008 for the ...

, had been developing the plan since mid-1959. The Income Doubling Plan was widely viewed as a success in achieving both its political and economic objectives. According to historian Nick Kapur, the plan "enshrined 'economic growthism' as a sort of secular religion of both the Japanese people and their government, bringing about a circumstance in which both the effectiveness of the government and the worth of the populace came to be measured above all by the annual percentage change in GDP." Various aspects of the plan have been studied by other nations, especially in Asia, hoping to copy Japan's model of export-led rapid economic growth. For example, China in recent years explicitly looked to 1960s Japanese economic policies as a model.

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