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Ministry of Finance hires from Dentsu; Consumption tax hike to be advertised to the public?

October 17, 2007
By Ken Worsley


On Monday, the Ministry of Finance announced that former Dentsu employee Yoshio Masuda, a 48 year-old who served with the firm for about ten years, began his stint as the ministry’s Director of Public Relations Planning and Coordination (広 企画調整官) on that day. Masuda is the first employee to join the ministry through a public recruitment process. Twelve other employees had been brought to the ministry from private firms before Masuda joined.

According to the Yomiuri, Masuda will serve a two year term in his post. The Yomiuri also hinted that while Masuda may be able to help the ministry communicate its policy better to the public, he might have come on board specifically to engineer plans to introduce a plan to hike the consumption tax to the public. We seem to recall that the 1997 consumption tax hike had quite the disastrous effect on a nascent economic recovery at that time - as described in the Small and Medium Enterprise Agency’s 1998 White Paper.

With Health, Labour and Welfare Minister Youichi Masuzoe saying earlier this week that an increase in the consumption tax needs to be considered, and the ruling LDP claiming that half of basic pension costs should be covered with revenues from that tax by fiscal 2009 (up from one third at the present), on Monday the LDP’s Kaoru Yosano said that the ruling party would lay out a plan to increase the consumption tax from its current 5% by the end of this year.

In a meeting of the LDP’s research panel on fiscal reform on Friday, member Ichita Yamamoto asked:

In a number of other countries 80 percent of the financing of successful fiscal reconstruction has come through spending cuts and 20 percent through tax hikes. Why can’t we apply the same formula to Japan?

Could the answer be that other countries don’t have Dentsu?

Filed Under Dentsu, Ministry of Finance 

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Comments

2 Responses to “Ministry of Finance hires from Dentsu; Consumption tax hike to be advertised to the public?”

  1. Huth on October 17th, 2007 2:29 pm

    Anyone think this could be the beginning of a trend? I’m surprised that a ministry is bringing someone inside to handle this rather than outsourcing it or hiring a consultancy, but it seems likely that they know they need to go with a Dentsu guy and after getting burned on the ‘town meeting’ fiasco, it’s safer to just bring the guy in.

    How ironic that it was an ‘open’ recruitment process.

  2. Fukuda’s new cabinet under economic fire from all sides Japan Economy News & Blog - Business, Economy, Marketing and Economic Reports on August 4th, 2008 10:59 pm

    […] appointment process. Yoshio Masuda, a 48 year-old who served with Dentsu for about ten years, was hired for a two year stint as the ministry’s Director of Public Relations Planning and Coordinatio…, a position believed to be involved with helping the ministry communicate its decisions better to […]

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