News & Insights

Japan faces enormous challenges with its declining and aging population. In order to improve economic efficiency and raise the potential growth rate, it must promote digitalization through innovation. While digitalization is the pillar of “Suganomics”, in the short term, the government has to develop infrastructure towards a digital society.

Prime Minister Suga’s near term policies will focus on tackling COVID-19, but his basic policies will follow where Abe left off. However, Suga faces numerous challenges that include income disparity and distribution policy. Suga’s economic policies must not counterpose his growth strategy with his income and distribution policy. Rather we would expect his income and distribution policy to reinforce his growth strategy. We hope to see the Suga Administration fully support and enforce these policies under the “4th Arrow”.

Japan's real GDP growth rate for April-June 2020 fell 28.1% QoQ annualized, the largest drop ever recorded. The impact of the measures against COVID-19 taken in Japan and overseas to forcibly suspend economic activity has directly hit both domestic and external demand.

In this commentary, we look back at the shareholders' meetings held in June 2020 under COVID-19, and discuss its features, changes, and the efforts to improve corporate governance by Japanese companies.

The number of foreign tourists visiting Japan almost quadrupled between 2012 and 2019. Unfortunately, due to COVID-19, it will take some time to achieve the target of 40 million visitors set for 2020 and to recover to levels seen in 2019. Although Japan's tourism industry will take several years to fully recover, we believe that the conditions for recovery are better than those of other countries.

The second supplementary budget for FY2020 including an additional economic stimulus measure against COVID-19 has passed the Diet. The total size of the budget including the first supplementary budget is JPY 234 trillion (approx. USDk9y54; 2.2 trillion), which equates to 42% of GDP. In this commentary, we introduce the contents of the supplementary budget and its impact on the labor and stock markets.

This month's report looks at how Japan is tackling the pandemic and what the world my look like once it is over.

In recent years in Japan, consumption behavior has changed “from owning to using", and this is thought to be due to two factors. Below, we discuss these two factors in depth

“Regional revitalization”, or the so-called Regional Abenomics, that began in FY 2015, is about to enter its second term. At the time of its introduction, a trial calculation of “cities at risk of disappearing” was conducted, creating a sensation. The result prompted a sharp rise in the awareness of population decline, the falling birth rate and aging population in rural areas.