Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appeared to be backing down on his stance regarding the planned sales tax hike next year. For now, he’s still on track to raise sales tax from 8% to 10% in October 2019. He also pledged to mitigate any impact on the economy by providing counter measures.
However, he told parliament that “Our basic stance is that we will proceed with the sales tax hike. But it’s wrong to be too rigid about this and raise the tax rate no matter what.” And, “we will proceed with the tax hike unless the economy is hit by a shock of the scale of the collapse of Lehman Brothers”, which “would be something like a global economic crisis or a huge earthquake.”
