Japanese Economic Minister Says Corporate Tax Rate Could be 29%

Economic and fiscal policy minister Akira Amari expressed eagerness to reduce Japan’s relatively heavy corporate tax rate to around 29 percent in stages from the next fiscal year, Japan’s most powerful business lobby said Wednesday.

During a meeting with Sadayuki Sakakibara, who assumed the chairmanship of the Japan Business Federation earlier this month, Amari said, “I want to bring (the country’s corporate tax rate) to that in Germany,” according to the group known as Keidanren.

It was the first time that a Cabinet member specified the level to which Japan’s 35 percent tax rate should be cut, after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pledged Friday to reduce it to below 30 percent within the next few years in a bid to invigorate foreign investment in the nation.

In Germany, the effective corporate tax rate stood at about 29.6 percent as of January 2013, data released by the Japanese Finance Ministry showed.

Amari also told Sakakibara that he will consider funding the corporate tax cuts with possible additional tax revenues on the back of economic recovery spurred by the “Abenomics” policy mix, centering on drastic monetary easing and massive fiscal spending.

“We have been making efforts to promote structural reform to beat deflation, boost nominal economic growth and bolster tax revenues,” Amari, the linchpin of Abe’s economic policies, told reporters after the meeting.

Government officials and ruling lawmakers, however, remain at odds over how to cover a possible decline in tax revenues in the wake of the proposed corporate tax cuts from the next fiscal year starting April 2015.

via Mainichi

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Alfonso Esparza

Alfonso Esparza

Senior Currency Analyst at Market Pulse
Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.
Alfonso Esparza