Japan risks falling into a similar sovereign-debt crisis as Europe if it doesn’t get the world’s “worst” public debt situation in order, a former finance minister said.
“What’s happening in Europe could take place someday in Japan,” Hirohisa Fujii, chairman of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan’s tax commission, said yesterday at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo. “Politicians must understand Japan has the world’s worst debt situation.”
Japan’s public debt is projected to reach 228 percent of GDP in 2013, about double the average forecast for G20 nations, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said in a report released on Oct. 31.
Japanese Vice Minister of Finance Fumihiko Igarashi yesterday said that the nation would need to eventually raise its sales tax to 17 percent from the current 5 percent to pay for growing welfare costs as the country’s population ages.
“A tax rate of 10 percent will be needed for some time, but the social security system can’t be managed unless it becomes about 17 percent,” Igarashi said at a forum in Tokyo.
Moody’s Investors Service and Standard and Poor’s have lowered Japan’s credit rating this year, pointing to the government’s inability to lay out plans to cut its debt burden.
The IMF said in July that Japan should raise its consumption tax rate to 7 percent or 8 percent next year, before gradually increasing it to 15 percent to help reduce the nation’s debt.
Japan has pledged to double the nation’s sales tax from 5 percent by 2015. The government projects public debt will exceed ¥1 quadrillion (US$13 trillion) in the year ending March as the nation pays for reconstruction costs from March’s record earthquake.
Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda said on Oct. 31 he would call a general election before increasing the sales tax rate. Public opinion is split over the tax plan, with 50.4 percent of respondents supporting the doubling of the rate and 48.1 percent opposed, a Kyodo News survey released on Nov. 6 showed.
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
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],”
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
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day