Economic Impacts

Here is a report from METI on Economic damage as of March 16 ... industries, infrastructure, etc.

Nuclear stuff, disaster victims, are in other reports.

BY PAUL WISEMAN and CHRIS RUGABER

The earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on Friday forced multinational companies to close factories, fight fires and move workers, inflicting at least short-term damage on the Japan's fragile economy.

Assessing the full economic impact was impossible in the hours after the quake. But traffic clogged streets, trains stopped, flights were grounded and phone service was disrupted or cut off.

U.S. companies DuPont and Procter & Gamble said communications problems made it hard to gauge the effect on their operations in Japan.

Japanese stocks plunged. The benchmark Nikkei index fell 1.7 percent, and the Japanese market was open only for about 15 minutes after the quake.

Still, the damage to Japan's economy, the world's third-largest, wasn't nearly as severe as it might have been. The devastated northeastern coastal region is far less developed than the Tokyo metro area.

"Something similar hitting Tokyo Bay would have been unimaginable," said Michael Smitka, an economist who specializes in Japan at Washington and Lee University.

And in the long run, the disaster could help the Japanese economy as reconstruction projects put people back to work.