ファイナンス 2017年7月号 Vol.53 No.4

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mics with Womenomics policies have been highly successful. And the next stage of raising participation rates by older workers is good.We’re particularly interested in the guest workers. The very positive development is that there’s about 1.1 million guest workers in Ja-pan right now. 176,000 new entrants in 2016. Those are quite good numbers.This is an important thing because I know there’s a strong social concern about immigra-tion. But it seems quite clear, looking at the data, that the government has been reasonably eective in maintaining an acceptable approach to guest workers. And so, this is again some-thing that needs to be looked at very carefully and managed carefully over the coming time.You used the word “cautiously optimistic”. I’m actually more optimistic about the state of humankind but I’m cautiously optimistic about the Japan prole because I do think the policy mix is right. And I encourage further focus, particularly on the third arrow of structural re-form because that’s critical to further drive ad-vances in productivity.That’s the next five to ten years. But then beyond that, there’ll still be a big question—where and how does Japan see itself in terms of scale or position in the global context. And even if the population stabilizes at 100 million, that’s still a lot dierent than 125 million. So that presents quite a different picture and I think strategically the country needs to ad-dress that issue. Not right now, because the policy mix is focusing on what can be done now, but what does the country think about in the context of 100 million population and the level of economic contribution to the world that implies versus the contribution that ap-plied at a historical rate over the last 30 years.▶Mr. Kanda：　You rightly mentioned about the structural reforms, most important element of the Abenomics. The market, foreign investors in particular, think the structural reform as the most important eort Japan needs and the cor-porate governance reform seems most interest-ed and positively welcomed by them, as I also sense as the Chair of the OECD CG Committee, which is the global standard setter on corporate governance. On the other hand, not a few criti-cisms remain against mediocre reforms in the areas including labor, health and agriculture as well as belated scal consolidation which might explode as a catastrophe around 2025. In the past, you praised Abenomics particularly for participation in TPP negotiations and the con-sumption tax hike while encouraging vigorous reforms in the labor market and medical regula-tion. Indeed I quite often receive similar opin-ions from overseas investors. Could you elabo-rate which structural reform you can positively rate and what elds of reform are most needed for the Japanese economy?▷Mr. Kindred：　In terms of what’s been done, that I think is really positive, the first one I would highlight is the corporate gover-nance area. You know, really excellent stimula-tion from the government, to move those ini-tiatives forward, whether it be the Stewardship Code, the Corporate Governance Code, and the focus on productivity within the corporate sector as a result of those changes. I think that’s had real traction.The agricultural sector is also one to high-light. The breakdown of the monopoly power of the cooperative system has been quite signif-icant. And that’s good for the agriculture sector. Japan has fantastic agriculture products, and I think it could be a booming export industry. So, while it’s a relatively small percentage of over-all GDP, unlocking that could be reasonably in-teresting in terms of at-the-margin change.Another area that I would highlight is taxa-tion policy. Clearly, the corporate tax rate has come down quite significantly, actually, and I think that was an impressive move for Japan to make, and makes this a more attractive en-vironment for the corporate sector.As I mentioned, the policies enabling growth ファイナンス　2017.737超有識者場外ヒアリング64連 載｜超有識者場外ヒアリング