To ensure Japan's future growth and prosperity, Japan's new prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, will need to uphold his promise to remain on the economic-policy path laid by his predecessor, Shinzo Abe. But that is easier said than done, owing to internal resistance and external misconceptions about Abenomics.
NEW HAVEN – With the departure of Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, one of the biggest questions facing his successor, Yoshihide Suga, is what to do about Abe’s signature economic-policy plan.
To be sure, Suga, who long served as Abe’s chief cabinet secretary, has already pledged to uphold so-called Abenomics – and for good reason. The strategy went a long way toward strengthening Japan’s limping economy, not least by spurring major employment gains: from the end of 2012, when Abe became prime minister, to the end of 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic began, more than five million Japanese joined the workforce.
Now, university graduates no longer have to worry whether they will find a place in the job market, and the tent villages occupied by homeless people have almost disappeared. Small wonder, then, that Japanese voters handed Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) landslide electoral victories in 2014 and again in 2017.
NEW HAVEN – With the departure of Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, one of the biggest questions facing his successor, Yoshihide Suga, is what to do about Abe’s signature economic-policy plan.
To be sure, Suga, who long served as Abe’s chief cabinet secretary, has already pledged to uphold so-called Abenomics – and for good reason. The strategy went a long way toward strengthening Japan’s limping economy, not least by spurring major employment gains: from the end of 2012, when Abe became prime minister, to the end of 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic began, more than five million Japanese joined the workforce.
Now, university graduates no longer have to worry whether they will find a place in the job market, and the tent villages occupied by homeless people have almost disappeared. Small wonder, then, that Japanese voters handed Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) landslide electoral victories in 2014 and again in 2017.