Japan is set to unveil a stimulus package worth ¥8 trillion (US$73 billion) in a bid to shore up the economy, a newspaper report said yesterday.
Economic fiscal policy minister Kaoru Yosano delivered a draft of the planned measures to Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda and Finance Minister Bunmei Ibuki on Friday, the Yomiuri Shimbun said.
Early this month, Fukuda ordered Yosano to draw up a package to boost economic growth and support small businesses as well as farmers and fishermen hit by soaring oil prices.
The measures are also designed to discount expressway tolls, support young job seekers and expand the nation’s medicare services for the elderly, the mass circulation daily said.
The latest stimulus is still smaller than a reform program worth ¥14.8 trillion announced in December 2002 by then-prime minister Junichiro Koizumi in December 2002.
The finance ministry is largely expected to submit an extra budget to parliament to finance the package, but Ibuki has said the government was not expecting to issue new bonds to finance it.
The government faces calls from some lawmakers within the ruling coalition for a big injection of public money to boost Asia’s largest economy, which contracted in the second quarter, moving closer to recession.
Japan has already unveiled measures to ease the burden of high oil prices, including a ¥74.5 billion package last month to help fishermen, who have held strikes to protest against soaring fuel costs.
Resource-poor Japan relies heavily on imports of crude oil, the price of which has doubled over the past two years and risen five-fold since 2003.
But some ministers have also stressed the need to rebuild the country’s debt-ridden finances.
Japan’s public debt is the highest among industrialized nations after the government spent trillions of yen on emergency spending packages to try to haul the economy out of the doldrums in the 1990s.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts