"Today, however, Abe’s failure is so widely recognized that current Prime Minister Fumio Kishida poses his ‘new capitalism’ agenda as a thinly veiled corrective to Abenomics."

"GDP growth is, of course, just a means to an end: growth in living standards. Under Abe, the opposite happened."

"Among regular workers, real wages per hour fell 4 percent from 2012 to 2018."

"Abe’s response was to futilely ask companies to hike wages. To get real results, he could have enforced Japanese laws that require equal pay for equal work between men and women as well as between regular and non-regular workers, by mandating the Labor Ministry to investigate and prosecute violations of the law. But he chose not to do so."

"He also continued the policy of shifting the share of national income from people to corporations, by cutting the top income tax on companies from 38 percent to 30 percent while doubling the consumption tax to 10 percent"

"Like his predecessors, Abe offered the ‘trickle down’ theory that corporations would use the tax cut to invest more and raise wages."

"Under Abe, 75 percent of the growth in female employment was in low-paying, dead-end non-regular jobs."

"In any case, the way that Abe overcame inflation was yet another blow to living standards."

"This kind of inflation simply shifts income from Japanese consumers to foreign producers, while raising profits at Japan’s big multinational companies."

"Abenomics would have helped Japan if Abe had truly pursued his promise of structural economic reforms, i.e., the ‘third arrow’ of the so-called three arrows of Abenomics."

"That, however, would have required stepping on powerful toes and, despite Abe’s unprecedented domination of the Diet, he chose not to spend his political capital in pursuit of reform."

"Perhaps that is because he believed his own hype that conquering deflation would be a painless path to growth."

"To take just one example, consumers pay high food prices because the mammoth Japan Agriculture (JA) cooperative is immune from the Anti-Monopoly Law. Abe claimed to have initiated a drastic reform of the JA, but, in reality, he ignored the advice of his own advisory council to break up the cooperative."

"Hollow measures like this were the hallmark of Abe’s ‘third arrow’ efforts."

"In reality, countries have lots of ‘last chances’. Japan’s continued corrosion under Abe does not mean that it cannot revive; it merely means that Abe blew his opportunity."