Following the Reaganomics era of the 1980s, many Canadian provinces began privatizing their healthcare systems in the early 1990s, as well as a few healthcare systems in the eastern portions of Europe. These things, which corresponded to the increased privatization of services across the Western World, resulted in the building of monopolies and megacorporations. All of the megacorporations across the globe began to increase in size in the early 2000s, resulting in further privatization. The European sovereign debt crisis of the 2010s was caused by the financial crisis of 2008, and as a result more austerity was implemented across the European continent in an attempt to fix this. One of the measures of austerity that were taken in those countries included the replacement of public healthcare with privatized sickcare systems. In Japan, two major metro systems were privatized between 2004 and 2018 in addition to the healthcare system there. The privatization of the Japanese healthcare systems in most of the country's 47 prefectures resulted in a decrease in available beds and the closure of many hospitals there.