Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's administration has obtained an average 2.7 points out of 5.0 in a recent Genron NPO study of its policy performance for the first year.

As the Abe administration enters its second year Dec. 26, the non-profit think tank evaluated how well the government has achieved the policy objectives launched by Abe's ruling Liberal Democratic Party and by himself chiefly in the party's "manifesto" election policy platform and parliamentary addresses.

The evaluation was made by a task force of about 30 researchers set up to this end by The Genron NPO, which selected 70 items from 11 verifiable policy fields, such as economics and national security. Separately, The Genron NPO polled about 2,000 intellectuals about their evaluation of the government's policy performance and obtained replies from 447 of them. The results of this questionnaire were used as a reference in the latest evaluation.

Abe once served as head of government, for about a year from 2006 to 2007. After his previous administration resigned, five prime ministers were inaugurated, but all these governments were short-lived, too. Therefore, the latest evaluation was the first study of a government's policy achievement for the first year. Of the 11 fields covered, the highest score, 3.3 points went to two policy sectors -- post-disaster restoration and anti-disaster measures, and agriculture. The lowest score, 2.0, was given to a proposed revision of Japan's Constitution.

The Genron NPO evaluated the administration's performance toward the House of Councilors election in June. Compared to the overall evaluation in the June study, the latest result showed a slight decline of 0.1 points. The sustained generally favorable evaluation reflects the government's active efforts to grapple with the challenges facing Japan in various fields. But specific evaluation results differed from sector to sector, indicating that the government's policy achievements will be actually questioned from now on as its first year is over.

The government's economic policy, or the so-called "Abenomics" policy mix, received an evaluation of 3.2 points, down from 3.7 points in the study in June. This can be attributed to the fact that a full economic recovery is yet to be seen as the government has failed to show visible effects despite Japan's bold monetary easing and its attempt to shift weight from public demand to private demand in stimulating the economy. Business sentiment has improved, reflecting the bold monetary easing and the government's flexible stance on fiscal policy management, but capital spending in the corporate sector and wages have yet to increase. A cautionary "amber light" is going to be lit for the government's target of achieving an inflation rate of 2 percent in two years while the government has to buy time by spending further on public works to keep the economy afloat. These are making it rather difficult to foresee a path toward fiscal reconstruction.

Agricultural policy won an increased rating as the government has implemented various measures for disaster-hit farming areas and scrapped the decades-old policy of reducing Japan's rice acreage by providing subsidies to farmers concerned, but the evaluation revealed that no strong weight is given to the social security and regional policy fields.

Overall, because the LDP's manifesto was incomplete as a campaign promise, the party has not come up with any policy set for individual sectors based on a vision or a philosophy for the future, and this has had an unfavorable influence on the evaluation result. Lack of accountability was generally blamed for unfavorable results in the evaluation. In particular, further efforts to explain to the people were sought for policy issues that had not been detailed in the party's campaign promise, notably the controversial legislation aimed at better protecting strategically important national secrets.

In the 11 fields under review, individual policy measures were evaluated by analyzing how seriously the government tried to attain the goals or policies involved.

The Abe administration's overall rating was 2.7 points out of 5.

Economic revival	Fiscal	Disaster restoration and anti-disaster measures	Education	Foreign policy and national security	Social security
3.2	2.7	３3.3	３	3.1	2.3

Energy	Regional revival	Agriculture, forestry and fisheries	Political and administrative reform	Constitutional revision
2.6	2.2	３3.3	2.7	２

The achievements were evaluated under the following criteria:

Ratings were given basically for policy goals specifically written in the “manifesto” campaign platform and other documents. But policies for which measures have been implemented despite lack of descriptions in these documents were evaluated as an exceptional case under the following method:

When an explanation is properly made to the people as to why the policies have been implemented, one point was added to the ratings for the items involved.

In cases when policy ideas can be read from the manifesto and other documents

In cases when policy ideas cannot be read from the manifesto and other documents