One of Japan’s most senior executives has sounded the alarm over the country’s companies “endlessly” investing in the US, as concerns grow about a lack of domestic investment needed to raise lagging productivity.
The warning from Yoshimitsu Kobayashi, chair of the Japan Productivity Centre economic think-tank, comes as Tokyo pushes forward with a $550bn fund for investment in the US that it agreed under duress last year to ward off punitive tariffs imposed by the Trump administration.
“Can this really go on forever, money at the scale of $550bn and domestic investment drying up? How we should evaluate these elements is a problem,” said Kobayashi, who is also the outgoing chair of Tokyo Electric Power, Japan’s largest power utility, and a former president of Mitsubishi Chemical.