The Cabinet of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe adopted two sets of economic and fiscal policy papers Friday filled with dozens of bold economic goals and plans that have already drawn fire for lacking specifics on how to achieve them.
The targets include doubling annual real gross domestic product growth to 2 percent and maintaining it for the next 10 years while halving the primary balance deficit — a key gauge of Japan's fiscal health — by 2015 and posting a surplus by 2020.
Neither set of papers elaborates on how Abe's team will achieve the targets, and thus appear like a continuation of the rosy economic rhetoric coming ahead of the vital July Upper House poll that the ruling bloc hopes to emerge from with a majority, which it lacks at present. The nation's GDP has been growing at an anemic pace of around 1 percent for the past decade.