Japan's economic roller coaster headed for another dip

Tokyo

AFTER three years of Abenomics and record monetary stimulus from the central bank, Japan's economy still can't escape a roller-coaster cycle of expansion and contraction.

The next round will commence on Feb 15, when gross domestic product (GDP) data for the fourth quarter is released. The forecast is pessimistic: that Japan's economy shrank 0.8 per cent on an annualised basis in the last three months of 2015, going by the median estimate of economists who responded to a Bloomberg survey. Revised data showed the GDP rose one per cent in the third quarter.