Shinzo Abe’s second wind

Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has been handed four more years to turn the country around.

The government of Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was convincingly re-elected in a snap election last weekend. Abe now has four more years in power, and investors will watch closely to see whether he can push through promised reforms to raise Japan's long-term growth rate, says Aaron Back in The Wall Street Journal.

Investors have yet to be convinced that he can stare down vested interests. Meanwhile, Japan's economic recovery has faltered due to a rise in the consumption tax (the equivalent of VAT). The economy seems to have stabilised, but the data points to a slow recovery.

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.