Japan to set up earthquake rehabilitation agency
The Japanese government is considering setting up a more organised agency to oversee the country's rehabilitation efforts after the devastating earthquake, a senior official said today.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told reporters in Tokyo that the government will weigh "some sort of system or organization" to oversee post-quake spending, adding that it's too "early to say when a spending bill will be compiled."
As of now the Japanese government is torn between the two major tasks of reconstruction to help the earthquake victims while equally managing the nuclear threat at Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear facility.
He noted that the country's economic managers have now assessed that the damage since the March 11 earthquake occurred has now reached 25 trillion yen.
In the first quarter, although the country's economic deceleration pattern has eased, the gains of higher exports and industrial output posted from January to February were quickly eradicated by the disaster left by the earthquake.
The power supply disruptions now experienced from the Northeast have cascaded to the southern part of Japan, prompting companies such as Sony, Toyota Motor Corp to suspend operations in some of their facilities.
The death toll following the disaster rose to 9,099 as of last night, according to the National Police Agency. Workers were still trying to avert a nuclear disaster in the power plant 220 kilometres (137 miles) north of Tokyo.
"It is necessary to set up a full-scale administration agency within the Cabinet to plan for basic reconstruction just as the Economic Stabilization Board was set up after the war," ruling-party lawmakers including Kouki Kobayashi, Yukio Ubukata and Jin Matsubara said in a statement.