Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's team on Monday unveiled more policies aimed at cheering companies and investors, including a plan to reduce corporate taxes, with the aim of raising share prices at home.
In a draft of Abe's revised economic growth strategy, the "third arrow" of his deflation-fighting "Abenomics" program, the government promised to ease regulations in agriculture, employment and health care that have been criticized as preventing the deflation-mired economy from breaking away.
But it remains to be seen whether any of the proposals will become reality, given the nation's precarious fiscal health, Abe's inability to follow through on a plethora of previous structural reforms pushed while campaigning for the general election in 2012, and protests from the farm and medicine industries long shielded by "rock-hard regulations."