Stiglitz to Abe: Don't Raise Japan's Sales Tax, Stimulate Growth

Nobel-prize winner Joseph Stiglitz urged Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe not to raise the nation’s sales tax next year, instead encouraging the premier to consider other forms of taxation that could stimulate the world’s third-largest economy.

"A consumption tax increase now is going in the wrong direction," the professor of economics at Columbia University told reporters in Tokyo on Wednesday after a meeting with the prime minister, Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda and key cabinet members and advisers. "A few years ago, no one would have anticipated that the global economy would be as weak as it is today."