Japan’s GDP likely to have shrunk in last quarter

Japan’s economy is expected to have contracted slightly more than initially estimated in the final quarter of 2015, and ominously the outlook held little cheer as domestic and external demand has remained stubbornly weak at the start of this year.

The world’s third-largest economy is forecast to have shrunk by an annualised 1.5% over the last three months of last year, according to a Reuters poll of 21 analysts, slightly worse than the early estimate of a 1.4% contraction.

The quarter-on-quarter GDP change was seen as being down 0.4%, unchanged from the initial estimate.