The annualized growth of the country's GDP in October-December was thus downgraded from 0.6% reported earlier in the year. Experts from the DailyFX portal predicted that the increase would amount to 0.8% over the last quarter of the past year.
At the same time, in the fourth quarter of 2022, the GDP showed no quarter-on-quarter change, while growing by 0.4% compared to the same period in 2021.
One of the causes of a slower economic growth is underperforming private consumption, which accounted for around 60% of Japan's GDP and rose by just 0.3% quarter-on-quarter in October-December 2022 against the earlier estimates of 0.5%.
Earlier, Japan's finance ministry has logged its largest one-month account deficit, which totaled 1.8 trillion yen ($14 billion), since 1985 due to rising energy prices and declining exports to China during the Lunar New Year holiday.