[Provisional Translation]

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe held the third meeting of the Council on Investments for the Future at the Prime Minister’s Office.

At the meeting, debate took place on the opening of public assets to the private sector (the promotion of the spread of public private partnerships and private finance initiatives (PPP/PFI); the opening of public data).

Based on the discussion, the Prime Minister said,

“We will completely open the infrastructure data held by each ministry, agency, and local municipality to the public, bring together the efforts of the public and private sectors, and thereby give rise to new and promising markets.

In April of this year, New Kansai International Airport introduced a concession approach and increased users, thus setting out a path for repaying its 1.2 trillion yen in debt. Regarding the proposal related to Sendai Airport, if safety can be ensured, it will be possible for people who are seeing off travelers to enter the security zone and shop in the airport. In order to spread the successes in the airport sector into other promising fields, by FY2018 we will create legal systems that make it possible for municipalities that pay off debt in advance to be exempt from paying compensation, thereby supporting leading municipalities.

We will also swiftly promote allowances in the Water Supply Act in order to make it possible to raise profitability across a wide region. We will also rectify systems within this fiscal year to allow those with management rights in cruise ports and other facilities to freely rent out those facilities to others.

Japan possesses major domestic infrastructure worth a value on a scale of trillions of yen in sales and 100 trillion yen in assets. Within this fiscal year, we will clarify plans for prioritized consideration for implementing PPP/PFI in all cities with populations over 200,000 people.

We will advance discussion in meetings of the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy in order to expand best practices across the country and enable them to have a large economic impact. Under the Basic Law on the Promotion of the Use of Public Data by the Private Sector, we will strongly promote open data while paying attention to safety, peace of mind, and personal information.

We will establish a control tower comprised of experts from the public and private sectors under the IT Strategic Headquarters, immediately determine the priority issues related to the needs of the private sector, and implement necessary measures during a focused period for initiatives lasting until 2020. I would like all relevant ministers to advance their reviews of the specific measures and timeframes proposed by the members of this Council, and immediately flesh these measures out.”