The $116 billion stimulus package unveiled Friday by Japan's new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is a step in the right direction for the world's third-largest economy and America's fourth-largest trading partner. Mr. Abe's predecessors in the center-left Democratic Party unwisely followed a course of fiscal austerity, and paid the price for it last month at the polls.
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Mr. Abe's package of public-works spending (much of it to rebuild the earthquake-shattered Fukushima region), investment tax credits and more spending on education and health care could help jump start the moribund Japanese economy. Stimulus alone, however, will not be enough for long-term revival. Structural reforms will be needed — though it won't be easy for Mr. Abe's conservative Liberal Democratic Party to challenge established interests like rural voters and government-dependent banks. But Japan has no other choice after two decades of anemic growth, sapping the buying power of consumers and the competitiveness of its leading companies.
Japan's population is aging and shrinking. Debt-laden "zombie" companies are kept alive by infusions of government credit. Too many workers are stuck in obsolete manufacturing industries and too few are available for potential growth areas like energy and health technologies. And with public debt equal to 220 percent of national output, Japan is already the world's most indebted major economy. The new stimulus package will provide no more than a short-term economic boost at the cost of still more government debt. Mr. Abe may well hope that a temporary boost from these measures will create enough new jobs fast enough to give his coalition the majority in the Parliament's upper house in elections this July. But if he wants to achieve sustainable growth as well, he needs to follow up with a package of structural reforms.
These should include provisions for letting zombie companies go bankrupt, phasing out costly agricultural subsidies and raising Japan's low rates of legal immigration to expand the working-age population. Some forward-looking steps, like expanded health care spending, are already in the stimulus package. But not enough. In 2009, reform-minded voters hoped that the center-left Democrats would carry out overdue changes. But squabbling and incompetence in that party brought only more political disappointment and economic decline. The renewed popularity of Mr. Abe's party could be equally short-lived unless it follows the stimulus package with lasting reforms.
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