Zhuzhong Pingcang

Heizo Takenaka joined the government of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in 2001. During this time, he served first as Minister of Economic and fiscal policy and then as Minister of Financial Services. He later served as Minister of Postal Service Privatization and Minister of the Interior and Communications. He is also a world-renowned economist. Takenaka worked closely with Prime Minister Koizumi on a series of Reform initiatives that they called the Koizumi Takenaka Reform Tokenaka Reform. During this period, he reformed and privatized Japanese Postal Saving Yucho, then the world's largest financial organization. Before that, he dealt with the nonperforming loan activities of some of Japan's major banks, which had hobbled the economy for more than a decade. During his tenure, real gross domestic product grew by an average of 22 per cent, while shares of Japanese companies rose by an average of more than 80 per cent on the back of positive investor sentiment. Takenaka worked hard to restructure the public finances, eventually leading to a dramatic improvement in the underlying fiscal balance, from a budget of Y28tn when he took office in 2002 to Y6tn in 2006. A nine percent increase in the total savings will be the same as in the consumption tax. Early in his career, he joined the Japan Development Bank and then began his academic career as a visiting scholar at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. In 1998, Takenaka was appointed as a member of the Prime Minister's Economic Policy Advisory Board of the Economic Strategy Council. In 2000, he was appointed to the IT Policy Advisory Committee of the Prime Minister's IT Strategy Council. Takenaka returned to academia after serving as a minister. He is currently a professor at Keio University and appears frequently on television and radio. He is the director of the Global Security Research Institute. He also serves on several advisory panels and committees, including the Japan Center for Economic Research, JCER Senior Fellow, Academyhills Director and Pasona Group Inc Chairman.