in the Japanese economy. After Shinzo Abe was elected as Japanese prime minister in December 2012, Abe introduced a reform program known as Abenomics which sought to address many of the issues raised by Japan's Lost Decades. His "three arrows" of reform intend to address Japan's chronically low inflation, decreasing worker productivity relative to other developed nations, and demographic issues raised by an aging population. Initially, investor response to the announced reform was strong, and the Nikkei 225 rallied to 20,000 in May 2015 from a low of around 9,000 in 2008. The Bank of Japan has set a 2% target for consumer-price inflation, although initial successes has been hampered by a sales tax increase enacted to balance the government budget. However, the impact on wages and consumer sentiment was more muted. A Kyodo News poll in January 2014 found that 73% of Japanese respondents had not personally noticed the effects of Abenomics, only 28 percent expected to see a pay raise, and nearly 70% were considering cutting back spending following the increase in the consumption tax. In 2020, Jun Saito of the Japan Center for Economic Research stated that the impact which came from the nation's coronavirus pandemic delivered the "final blow" to Japan's long fledgling economy, which had resumed slow growth in 2018. Social effects While economic commentators tend to see stagnation as a negative phenomenon, qualitative studies conducted in Japan show the opposite. There was a measurable increase in life satisfaction during the Lost Decades. Conversely, during the period of rapid growth in asset prices, no evidence of increased well-being was found in relation to that growth. This is partly due to the asset bubble being a driver for economic inequality, whereas the decades following the bubble's collapse have seen more economic equality and increased social spending by the government. The lessons from Japan align with concepts such as degrowth or qualitative metrics like GNH, which suggest that economic growth is not necessarily an appropriate metric for measuring the success and wellbeing of a society. Interpretation Economist Paul Krugman has argued that Japan's lost decades is an example of a liquidity trap (a situation in which monetary policy is unable to lower nominal interest rates because it is already close to zero). He explained how truly massive the asset bubble was in Japan by 1990, with a tripling of land and stock market prices during the prosperous