"Upon making a decision on a tax hike, we need to be careful not to slow down the economic recovery. What’s most important is not to let it go back to deflation," Japanese Economy Minister Akira Amari said.
"We were actually hoping for about two percent annual growth during the fall quarter which would have been very important to show that the economy is not just bottoming-out after the sales tax hike in April, but also growing strongly already. This negative number is clearly a disappointment and shows that the economy takes much longer to recover than we were hoping for," Martin Schulz, senior economist with Fujitsu Research Institute said.