Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has told a British financial newspaper that his top priorities for his second year in office are to privatize the postal services and public organizations, including Japan Highway Public Corp., and to accelerate the disposal of banks' bad loans.
Koizumi told the Financial Times in an interview Friday that structural reform "is proceeding well." The interview was published Monday.
On the privatization of Government Housing Loan Corp., the paper quoted Koizumi as saying that, contrary to opponents' worries that the private sector would be unable to provide housing loans, "As soon as we announced we intended to scrap (the public body), those private financial institutions . . . have come up with more favorable products."