Weak Japan data bolster stimulus case Japan has posted a mostly weak batch of economic data for November, bolstering the case for fresh monetary and fiscal stimulus pushed by Shinzo Abe, the country's returning prime minister. Consumer prices slid 0.1 per cent last month from a year earlier, the Statistics Bureau reported on Friday, underlining Japan's long struggle with deflationary pressures. Industrial production was much weaker than economists expected, slipping 1.7 per cent from October, suggesting that manufacturers continue to suffer from faltering domestic demand and also the effects of the simmering territorial dispute with China, its main export market. Since former premier Yoshihiko Noda called a lower-house election in mid-November, Liberal Democrat leader Mr Abe has urged monetary policy makers at the Bank of Japan to take bolder steps to boost economic activity and to weaken the Japanese currency, while also laying the groundwork for a large fiscal stimulus package. An early boost to output will be critical for the new administration, said analysts. Solid growth in the first quarter of the next fiscal year beginning in April will be vital, they said, both to strengthen the Liberal Democrat party's chances of consolidating its power in the July elections in the upper house - in which no party has an overall majority - and also to lay the groundwork for an increase in sales tax beginning in April 2014, which is the priority of Japan's powerful finance ministry. Encouraging the BoJ to adopt a higher inflation target than its current 1 per cent, and to take bolder measures to achieve it, will be among Mr Abe's first tasks, said Heizo Takenaka, a former colleague of Mr Abe's in the popular LDP administration of Junichiro Koizumi, and now a professor at Keio University in Tokyo. At its last policy meeting last week, the BoJ said it would discuss its 1 per cent target - reviewed, in principle, every April - as soon as next month. In the press conference that followed, governor Masaaki Shirakawa acknowledged that he had moved the review forward at Mr Abe's request. "[Mr Abe] needs some kind of early success," said Mr Takenaka. Fiscal stimulus takes time, but in the case of monetary policy, he can realise his goals fairly quickly. The world's third-largest economy posted back-to-back contractions in the two quarters to the end of September, and another is likely in the current quarter, said Kiichi Murashima, chief economist at Citi in Tokyo. While some of Friday's data were brighter - including a slight fall in the rate of unemployment and a rise in retail sales - the general picture suggests that the BoJ will follow up December's easing with more steps next month. Core CPI for the Tokyo area, for example, which tends to be an early indicator of national price trends, fell 0.6 per cent in December compared with a 0.5 per cent fall in the previous month. "It doesn't make any sense for the BoJ to resist political pressure," said Mr Murashima.