Latest BOJ tankan survey shows businesses still in the doldrums

Tokyo

AFTER two years of "Abenomics" policies and two successive rounds of aggressive monetary easing, the mood among Japanese businesses and industry remains highly cautious, and is likely to remain so in the short-term, the latest tankan survey by the Bank of Japan (BOJ) revealed on Wednesday.

The quarterly tankan, which polls more than 11,000 Japanese firms across a spectrum of businesses, showed that sentiment among large manufacturing firms to have stayed unchanged in March from three months before. This has confounded analysts, who had forecast that sentiment would rise.