Japan's PM turns spotlight back on Abenomics

Tokyo

IN what was widely seen as an effort to refocus the attention of the Japanese public and of the outside world on the set of economic policies known as "Abenomics", Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Thursday pledged to greatly boost the size of the world's third-largest economy and to bolster welfare.

His pledge to increase the nominal size of Japan's gross domestic product (GDP) by around 20 per cent to some 600 trillion yen (S$7.2 trillion) came in the wake of a bitterly divisive debate over controversial new security laws that Mr Abe's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)-led administration pushed through last week.

Mr Abe did set a date for achieving what economists said is an ambitious target for a major increase in the size of the economy. The target is not strictly new, however, some said, because Mr Abe had alre…