JAPANESE Prime Minister Shinzo Abe unveiled a plan Friday to cut the corporate tax rate below 30 percent in stages to help pull the economy out of two decades of sluggish growth and deflation.

    Investors have been scrutinizing whether Japan can substantially lower the corporate tax rate — among the highest in the world — to spur growth in the world’s third-largest economy. Abe also needs to strike a delicate balance between stimulating growth and reining in snowballing public debt, twice the size of its US$5 trillion economy.

    The corporate tax cut is a major issue to be included in the government’s key fiscal and economic policy outline, which will be finalized around June 27 along with a detailed “growth strategy” of structural reforms.

    “Japan’s corporate tax rate will change into one that promotes growth,” Abe told reporters, adding that he hoped the lower burden on companies would lead to job creation and an improvement also for private citizens.

    He also said the government would make sure that alternative revenue sources were secured to offset a decline in corporate tax revenue. He did not elaborate.

    The government said in its draft policy outline it would decide on a concrete plan by the year’s end to secure a “permanent revenue source” needed for corporate tax cuts, such as broadening the tax base.

    An alternative revenue source must be secured permanently so that Japan can achieve its aim of bringing its primary budget balance — excluding new bond sales and debt servicing — into the black in the fiscal year to March 2021, it said in the draft.

    The government reiterated it would decide by the year-end whether to go ahead with its plan to raise the sales tax to 10 percent in October 2015. The national sales tax rose to 8 percent from 5 percent April 1 in a bid to fix the public debt.

    Japan’s corporate tax rate is nearly 36 percent for large companies operating in Tokyo, among the highest in the industrialized world.

    Japan’s corporate tax rate ranks second after the United States among the 34-member OECD economies, with countries such as Britain, Italy and Canada below 30 percent.

    In Asia, China and South Korea impose a corporate tax around 25 percent and Singapore puts it at 17 percent.

    (SD-Agencies)