Finance Minister Katayama has been nominated to chair the joint World Bank-IMF Development Committee, the first time a Japanese finance minister will hold the post since the committee was set up in 1974. She told a post-cabinet press conference on 13 October that she is due to be formally selected at the committee's meeting in Bangkok on Thursday 15 October.
A two-year term, four meetings
The term runs from the end of that meeting to October 2028. Katayama said she would actually preside over four sessions: April next year (she said probably in Washington), then October, April and October again. She described the committee as a forum where ministers from the main World Bank and IMF members discuss development issues and make recommendations to both institutions. Prime Minister Takaichi announced the nomination on X the previous evening at 9pm, and Katayama said she followed about 20 minutes later.
Katayama said she would draw on Japan's development policy and international financial policy experience to steer the debate. She has not yet confirmed that she will travel to Bangkok. Overseas travel needs the approval of the Diet's steering committee, which had not met, and she said she could not say definitively that she would go until it did. If cleared, she expects to discuss the global situation with counterparts, including frontier AI, around the G7 and G20 meetings. She called the outlook fluid whether or not US Treasury Secretary Bessent attends.
No number yet on the spending review
Asked how much money the review of tax breaks, subsidies and funds could free up, Katayama gave no figure. She said negotiations were under way and the scale would be examined in the budget-compilation process. Her fiscal principles, as she restated them, are to review both spending and revenue in light of tax-revenue trends, to work out the fiscal scale compatible with a steadily falling debt-to-GDP ratio, and to control full-year government bond issuance.
The demands on that framework are growing. She listed a cut in the consumption tax rate on food and drink, a "Strong and Prosperous Japan" investment frame, and price-linked adjustments to account for economic and price trends. Katayama, who also leads the government's "Japan-style DOGE" effort, said it had added a review of government funds to its existing look at tax breaks and subsidies, as announced on the previous Friday. Earlier Tokyo Brief coverage
Supplementary budgets in scope
The clearest number came on supplementary budgets. Katayama said price-relief measures have taken roughly ¥3tn a year in each of the supplementary budgets for the years to March 2024, 2025 and 2026. She added that the support payment and bridging measures now under consideration serve as price relief, and that the review of that supplementary-budget spending can take them into account. Compilation of supplementary budgets will be limited to measures of genuinely high urgency, under the government's budget-reform policy.
The conference does not say which budget lines will be cut, and Katayama said she could not put a figure on it at this stage, with negotiations still under way.