According to the Bank’s interim assessment in January of the October 2014 Outlook for Economic Activity and Prices (hereafter the Outlook Report), the Policy Board members’ forecasts of the real GDP growth rate was minus 0.5 percent for fiscal 2014, but 2.1 percent for fiscal 2015, and 1.6 percent for fiscal 2016 (Chart 1).
I will discuss the following two key points in some detail. The first one is developments in exports and production in the corporate sector, and the second is developments in wages and private consumption in the household sector.