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Dec. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Japan’s $268 million Ibaraki Airport is on schedule to open for business in March 2010. The hard part will be persuading an airline to fly there.
The government and Ibaraki prefecture, home to 3 million people, are paying for the airport north of Tokyo, which won’t have train services and is a half-hour drive from Ibaraki’s capital, Mito. Japan Airlines Corp. and All Nippon Airways Co., which operate 90 percent of flights in the country, don’t plan to use it.
As the global credit crunch drives Japan into its first recession since 2001, the country is building roads and airports that have helped make it the world’s most indebted major economy. Critics say many of the projects have little economic value beyond the building industry.
“The government is squeezing health care and other social programs and then spending billions and trillions of yen on useless construction projects,” said Stephen Church, an economist at securities researcher JapanInvest in Tokyo. “Ibaraki is just a small example of that.”
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The government and Ibaraki prefecture, home to 3 million people, are paying for the airport north of Tokyo, which won’t have train services and is a half-hour drive from Ibaraki’s capital, Mito. Japan Airlines Corp. and All Nippon Airways Co., which operate 90 percent of flights in the country, don’t plan to use it.
As the global credit crunch drives Japan into its first recession since 2001, the country is building roads and airports that have helped make it the world’s most indebted major economy. Critics say many of the projects have little economic value beyond the building industry.
“The government is squeezing health care and other social programs and then spending billions and trillions of yen on useless construction projects,” said Stephen Church, an economist at securities researcher JapanInvest in Tokyo. “Ibaraki is just a small example of that.”
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