Word: primed
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Budget Under Control In mid-September, the DPJ will take over officially, with the Diet's election of Hatoyama as Prime Minister and the appointment of ministers. That leaves 100 days for the new administration to draft a budget for the next fiscal year that doesn't increase the national deficit - now at 180% of GDP, the highest ratio among developed countries - but still provides funds for costly election-year promises. The deadline is all the more pressing because Japan's still anemic economic recovery could falter without the steady infusion of government spending...
...budget formulation to foreign policy. The bureaucracy can be virtually impervious to change partly because its members are not accountable to elected officials - there's no personnel overhaul with a change in administration. The DPJ has vowed to implement some checks and balances by expanding the power of the Prime Minister's office and the Cabinet. But it's a delicate job that could easily go sour. (See pictures of Japan in 1989 and Japan...
...plans to appoint 100 ruling-party politicians to oversee ministries. In order to transfer more power to the Cabinet - and away from ministry bureaucrats - the DPJ will also replace the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy, an advisory group to the Prime Minister's office set up in 2001, with a National Strategy Bureau (NSB) reporting to the Prime Minister. The NSB will be key in budget and diplomatic-policy formulation. The DPJ also wants to improve government transparency and crack down on conflicts of interest by eliminating amakudari, or "descent from heaven," a system whereby retiring bureaucrats are posted...
...leader Yukio Hatoyama, who will be voted in as Prime Minister later this month, said the election represented "the first-ever proper change in government in the history of our constitutional politics." He leads a party cobbled together from groups united in not much more than their opposition to the LDP; it has no obvious coherent ideology of its own. Though there are a number of old heads in the party--its éminence grise, former LDP minister Ichiro Ozawa, has been a player in Japanese politics for 30 years--no fewer than 46% of its Diet members will...
...This would have been a good occasion to say sorry.' ANDRZEJ HALICKI, chairman of the Polish parliament's foreign-affairs committee, on the speech by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (right) marking the 70th anniversary of the start of World War II. Putin drew praise for his conciliatory tone, but he stopped short of apologizing for Russia's occupation of Poland...