However, the main driving force of a rise in growth potential is the private sector, and the mutual interaction between firms' innovation and investment is more important than anything else. In order to further enhance Japan's growth potential, firms need to continue with positive investment that leads to the creation of new values and an improvement in productivity.
IT investment to address the digitalizing society is expected to be one of the areas of such positive investment. Japanese firms already have made efforts in this area (Chart 9). R&D  6  expenditure during the past few years has been pushed up largely by investment in automobile-related industries.