Speaker 2
any particular sectors within the Japanese economy that you think might be particularly compelling?
Speaker 1
Well, I think to begin with the sectors that have traditionally been very competitive in Japan have been those who are the traditional exporters. So whether it's in the electronics or heavy industry or IT related, then I think those are probably the clear near term performers. The harder ones are going to be the services sector firms. And that's also though where we see the test of governance. If we're actually seeing real change, then the services sector, which has tended to be kind of a buffer, I mean, it's a lot more domestic than some of these other sectors. It's been traditionally where jobs have been, there's been the cushion to the deflation and years of stagnant growth. Not a lot of jobs have been shed in Japan. If you compare it to, for instance, US economic cycles in the US when during economic cycles, then there's a lot more job destruction or job elimination. In Japan, traditionally, there's been a lot more pay cuts. And then that itself is deflationary. I'm not saying that Japan is going to suddenly move to an American model of job elimination in cycles, but it's possible that with the demographics, there's an aging demographic, there is a supply shortage in Japan, there's possibility to really try and get the balance right of investment in labor and capital and allocation in labor and capital. And perhaps what we were discussing earlier, the investment in AI and how we use AI matters. Well, this might be a key point for aging Japan. If we get the ability of the labor in the market already to leverage the benefits of the existing technology, we might get a good boost to productivity and productivity, as in at least as macro economists have modeled, is a long-term driver of growth. Very