After months of wrangling, a special task force of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party announced July 11 its final plan to streamline government-affiliated financial institutions, including abolition of the Japan Development Bank in 1999.
The LDP panel's report also calls for a merger of the Export-Import Bank of Japan and the Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund, but it drops an earlier plan to privatize the Central Bank for Commercial and Industrial Cooperatives.
Under the plan, the JDB, a leading government-linked financier established in 1951, will be abolished and replaced with a new public financial body to take over some tasks still deemed necessary. The government will terminate the JDB's main service of extending low-interest loans to large businesses in major industries, now that the bank's initial goal of fostering the nation's industries in the devastating wake of World War II has been accomplished, according to the LDP panel.