Japan FY 2025 Budget Requests to Rewrite Record High

Tokyo, Aug. 28 (Jiji Press)--The total amount of general-account budget requests from Japanese government ministries and agencies for fiscal 2025 is expected to exceed the present record high of 114,385.2 billion yen, made for the current fiscal year through next March, it was learned Wednesday. 

Topping 110 trillion yen for the fourth straight year, the requests may reach 116 trillion yen reflecting ballooning debt servicing costs and defense and social security spending.

The Finance Ministry is seeking 28,911.6 billion yen for redeeming government debt securities and paying interest on outstanding debts.

The figure is nearly 2 trillion yen higher than the current all-time high on an initial budget basis, marked for fiscal 2024, because of the Bank of Japan's interest rate increases and a hike in the assumed interest rate used to calculate the debt servicing costs to 2.1 pct from 1.5 pct set at the time of the ministry's previous budget request. The new level is the highest since 2.2 pct in the budget request for fiscal 2015.

The Defense Ministry's budget request amounts to a record 8.5 trillion yen under the policy of drastically beefing up the country's defense capabilities, while the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry is asking for an unprecedented sum of 34,276.3 billion yen.

Among agencies, the Children and Families Agency, launched last year, is hoping to get 4,218.9 billion yen, up 1.8 pct from the fiscal 2024 initial budget, to mainly tackle the declining birthrate.

Observers pointed out that the actual fiscal 2025 budget size would be larger than the combined requests, whose details will be announced shortly.

The government has set again a special spending quota for anti-deflation measures and allowed requests to be made without specifying their amounts if they are for promoting wage increases and alleviating the impact of price spikes, they noted.

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