The government on Friday revised upward its basic assessment of the economy, describing it as "recovering" for the first time in six years, on the back of robust consumer spending ahead of the sales tax hike in April and improvement in business investment.
"The Japanese economy is recovering at a moderate pace," the Cabinet Office said in its monthly economic report, in which it upgraded its views on three of the 14 categories — consumption, business investment and business failures.
It was the first time for the government to specify the economy as "recovering" since January 2008, before it started to languish against a backdrop of the global financial crisis triggered by the collapse of U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in September that year.