JAPAN

Officials Disagree on Nature of Slump: A government official said last week that the economy is in recession. But some Cabinet ministers said the slide has hit bottom. “We are in recession,” Isoroku Sawada of the Economic Planning Agency said a day after the government reported the second consecutive quarter of contraction in the gross domestic product, the first time that has happened since the “oil shock” of 1974. The planning agency said Japan’s GDP fell 0.4% in the July-September quarter, after shrinking 0.2% the previous quarter. Though economists say there is no firm definition of recession, two straight quarters of negative growth is the measure used in the United States. For months, Japanese officials have delivered more optimistic estimates on the economy than private economists.