Abe's 'three arrows' miss targets

Japan has to look beyond the failed Abenomics and carry out structural reforms to revive the country's economic health

People queue up at a supermarket two small blocks from my apartment in Tokyo every Thursday when vegetables and fruits are on sale. Japan's wage earners have to spend every penny carefully since the consumption tax was raised from 5 percent to 8 percent in April. And the shrinking buying power of their paychecks has dragged down the Japanese economy.

On Nov 18, two days after the Japanese Cabinet's preliminary report on the third quarter signaled the country had slipped into recession, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe delayed another consumption tax rise until April 2017. In 2012, the Japanese parliament approved the move to raise the consumption tax first to 8 percent and then to 10 percent (in October 2015) to curb Japan's swollen sovereign debt, which, at more than twice the size of the economy, is the largest in the world.