The corporate tax rate should be reduced by at least 5 percentage points to compete with other Asian economies in attracting companies, a member of the government's Tax Commission said.
"Japan should house regional headquarters like Hong Kong or Singapore," Eiji Tajika, 63, an economics professor at Hitotsubashi University, said Wednesday in an interview in Tokyo. Failure to cut corporate taxes would leave Japan on an unequal footing with overseas rivals, he said.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said this month he wants to discuss cutting the corporate tax, which at 35.6 percent is one of the highest among developed nations. The issue may come to prominence it Abe gets his expected mandate in Sunday's election to push through his "third arrow" of structural reforms.