fiscal-policy

Seven Years of 'Fiscal Consolidation' Discourse — The Temporal Structure of Fiscal-Crisis Language in Japanese Local Assemblies (2018–2024)

Using the minutes dataset built by the Machikarte Lab, we aggregated speeches containing fiscal-crisis terms — 'fiscal consolidation,' 'fiscal reconstruction,' 'fiscal rigidity,' 'fiscal adjustment fund,' and 'real debt service ratio' — by year and prefecture for 2018–2024. Annual mention counts moved in the range of roughly 20,000 to 30,000 speeches per year, trending flat from 2018 to 2020 and rising gradually from 2021 onward to reach the low 30,000s in 2024. The gap in discussion density across prefectures reaches approximately eightfold, and that gap does not map one-to-one onto fiscal conditions. This article reads the data as observational findings on the temporal structure and regional distribution of fiscal-consolidation discourse in assembly proceedings — not as an evaluation of individual assemblies.