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2016 February 3 - 9 [POLITICS]

JCP Fujino: Abenomics causes serious damage to people’s livelihoods

Japanese Communist Party lawmaker Fujino Yasufumi revealed at a Lower House Budget Committee session on February 5 that Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s economic policy dubbed “Abenomics” is causing more people to sink into poverty.

In recent Diet discussions, PM Abe is frequently boasting of “good effects” of Abenomics, insisting that the policy has helped increase workers’ wages, create many jobs, and consequently lead Japan’s economy to a positive cycle.

Referring to the Labor Ministry’s Monthly Labor Survey, Fujino pointed to the fact that the average of workers’ real wages has decreased 5% in the past three years since PM Abe took office in December 2012. Abe made an excuse in response by saying that the decline in real wages is attributed to the increased number of low-paid contingent workers, not to a drop in wages.

Fujino then cited figures in the Mini-Economic White Paper published by the Cabinet Office. The paper shows that the wage index of regular workers decreased from 87.1 in November 2012 to 84.1 in November 2015 and that that of non-regular workers also went down from 102.3 to 96.2 in the same period of time.

Quoting data from the Internal Ministry’s Labor Force Survey, the JCP parliamentarian went on to point out that contrary to the prime minister’s explanation, the number of regular jobs has declined as well. The survey indicates that the number of regular employees decreased from 33.30 million in the October-December quarter of 2012 to 33.16 million in the same quarter of 2015.

“Do you admit these statistics are true?” Fujino asked Abe. The prime minister just replied, “I’ll carefully analyze the data.”

Mentioning a private-sector think tank’s trial calculation indicating that Japan’s GDP growth has again turned negative in the October-December quarter of 2015, the JCP legislator argued that there is no sign of such a “favorable cycle” as PM Abe is claiming. Underscoring the need to boost personal consumption in order to revitalize the Japanese economy, he demanded that the Abe administration abandon the plan to raise the consumption tax rate from the current 8% to 10% in April 2017.

Past related article:
> BOJ’s minus rate policy underlines failure of Abenomics [January 30, 2016]