Japan should push back if President-elect Donald Trump uses “wrong economics,” said an adviser of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to Reuters in an unusually direct expression. As Trump takes over White House on Friday, January 20, 2017; his policies to impose border tax on import and unsettles the global trade. Officials and executives in export powerhouse Japan have been privately concerned about Trump’s policies, but have largely been muted in public.
Koichi Hamada, professor of economics at Yale University and cabinet adviser, said Japan could relax its timetable for balancing the budget in the next four years and should be ready to further delay a planned sales-tax hike to ensure economic growth.
“There is some danger if he bases his decisions on wrong economics without listening to good advisers, and if he thinks that he could manage national economic matters as he does his real-estate company,” Hamada said in an interview on Thursday.
“If the United States were to be led by a near-autocrat and if Japan cooperates just to please him, that would break the whole world system,” he said.
And if Trump should criticise Japan for not going along, Hamada said Tokyo should respond: “You’re wrong. Please heed the views of your own experts.”
