On Thursday last week, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced that he would be launching “three new arrows” in his bid to rescue the Japanese economy. These new arrows are a pledge to increase gross domestic product by 22 percent, another to increase government benefits for families in an effort to improve Japan’s woeful fertility rate, and a commitment to social security for the elderly. The phrasing of the announcement, delivered immediately after Abe was re-elected leader of his Liberal Democratic Party for another three years, was designed to sound like a reboot of Abenomics, the great three-arrowed experiment Abe launched when he came to power in December 2012.

But this was a very different type of announcement. The 2012 plan was a widely lauded and comprehensive strategy for attacking Japan’s deep-seated economic problems with substantive monetary and fiscal stimulus and an array of structural reforms. The 2015 iteration, by contrast, includes a GDP target without a time limit, a policy that pays lip service to improving Japan’s demographics with no mention of opening up immigration, and what seems like a nakedly political appeal to the elderly, the most dominant section of the Japanese electorate. Where Abenomics was a politically risky attempt to confront Japan’s problems, these new arrows look mainly designed to win votes.

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