Prime Minister Shinzo Abe held the 20th meeting of the Industrial Competitiveness Council at the Prime Minister's Office.

During the meeting, discussion took place on the “Report on Important Measures for Strengthening Industrial Competitiveness (draft),” the "Action Plan for Strengthening Industrial Competitiveness (draft)," and the "Review Guidelines for the Progress of the Growth Strategy (draft).”

Based on the discussion, the Prime Minister said in his address,

“I would like to make 2015 a year in which we make significant progress with regards to reform. The Diet is now underway and I have positioned this Diet as one that carries out reforms to ensure that this session we will tackle reform of vested interests and to produce excellent results in our growth strategy.

Based on today’s discussions, we will now turn our attention to getting the “Action Plan for Strengthening Industrial Competitiveness” approved by the Cabinet and seek to implement the growth strategy without fail.

There is no end in our reform. Today, we compiled the Review Guidelines for the Progress of the Growth Strategy in order to further advance the growth strategy. We will now engage in structural reform based on three perspectives.

First, Japan has a great deal of world-leading latent talent when it comes to our human resources and technologies. We will reform Japan’s markets by further reinforcing our country’s earning ability and strengths in human resources.

Second, the world is fast approaching a future where big data and artificial intelligence will be widely utilized. We will seek to become the world’s foremost innovator in these fields and shift to a new industrial structure.

Finally, third, we will accelerate domestic reform as a way of gaining momentum in the build up to the 2020 Olympics and Paralympics that will be hosted by Tokyo. We will begin projects that will demonstrate our new stance to the world in a tangible and practical manner.
I would like to ask all of you to carry out further reviews aimed at the goal of revising the growth strategy during the middle of this year. I also request that all relevant ministers work on formulating concrete and specific policies related to this review of the challenges.”