Five-Year Economic Plan Unveiled in Japan : Commerce: It calls on the government to shorten work hours, cut housing costs and improve public welfare by investing in social infrastructure.

To get along with the rest of the world and improve the living standards of its people, Japan should focus less attention on efficiency and production and more on individual happiness and public welfare.

Those were among the recommendations set forth in a five-year economic plan released today. The plan, put together by a committee of academics, government officials and business executives, is supposed to guide the government in policy-making.

It calls on Japan to shorten work hours, lower housing costs and improve public welfare by investing in such social infrastructure as sewage systems.

“What we are seeking is not materialistic prosperity but a better quality of life,” said Minoru Nagaoka, president of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and chairman of the committee that put the plan together.

The plan sets forth annual economic growth targets of 3.5% a year between 1992 and 1996, the lowest growth targets ever set in the postwar period. A majority of the growth is expected to come from domestic demand rather than exports.

Nagaoka said the focus on quality-of-life issues will help promote imports and scale back Japan’s ballooning trade surplus.

Although the plan must still be translated into concrete policy by the various government ministries, Nagaoka said one focus is greater public spending on housing. One goal is to bring the cost of an apartment down from the current level of about seven times the average family’s annual income to about five times.

The report also proposes increasing the number of households connected to sewage systems to 70% by the year 2000, up from the current 45%.

Economists are skeptical of the government’s ability to meet the plan’s goals.

“The only way to meet the goals is to force domestic growth through public spending, but Japan’s government debt is already too large,” says Kenji Mizutani, senior managing director and chief economist at Tokai Bank.

Meeting the government’s goals of cutting annual working hours from 2,008 to 1,800 will also be difficult at a time when Japan’s population is aging and its work force shrinking, Mizutani says.

Nagaoka concedes that Japan is “neck-and-neck” with the United States in its level of per capita national debt.

However, he says the government can generate more money for investing in social infrastructure by streamlining its bureaucracy. He also sees big potential from encouraging a new “change in consciousness” of the individual and corporation.

The report often reads more like a self-awareness manual than an economic tract. In one section it says “emphasis must be placed on the affluence of the mind: consideration for others and the sense of satisfaction which is derived from contributing in a positive way, and by an act of personal choice, to society and the world at large.”