Tokyo Agile Financial News: Japan needs competition
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/13/us-japan-politics-reform-idUSBRE92C0B320130313
(Reuters) - Japan's government should steer clear of picking industrial winners and losers and focus on opening the economy to trade and competition as the best way to boost growth, but not all those advising Prime Minister Shinzo Abe agree on which strategy to stress, a member of a panel on industrial competitiveness said.
"We don't have explicit confrontations and we don't yell at each other in meetings, but I am sure that there are different philosophies about how, and how much, the government should be involved in creating the strategy and reforming particular industries," Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO of e-commerce operator Rakuten Inc (4755.OS) told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday.
Abe is expected to announce as early as this week that Tokyo will seek to join talks on the U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) pact, despite opposition from Japan's farm lobby and other business sectors which fear fallout from removing tariffs and less visible barriers to trade.
His government is also set to unveil a growth and competitiveness strategy in June - the final piece of a policy triad after fiscal spending and hyper-easy monetary policy. Financial markets see joining TPP talks as a harbinger of reforms needed to unlock growth in the long-stagnant economy.
Mikitani, a Harvard MBA who founded Amazon rival Rakuten in 1997, said TPP was part of Abe's broader effort to revive growth in the world's third-largest economy.
"We need to open these markets. We need to adopt global standards as much as possible. That is the only way that all these Japanese companies can become globally competitive and if they cannot do that, we should not be in that industry," he said in fluent English.
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