A short-term projection for Japanese central government debt via WASD neuronet

Japan has the highest debt-to-GDP ratio among advanced countries. Japanese central government debt has increased rapidly in the past 20 years. According to the data provided by Ministry of Finance, Japan, the total central government debt (TCGD) of Japan reached 1, 066,423.4 billion (December 31, 2016). This number refreshes the history record of Japanese central government debt. It is important to conduct a projection for the TCGD so that the government can make better fiscal policies and predict the risk in the future. In this paper, we conduct a ten-quarter projection for the TCGD of Japan via a three-layer feed-forward neuronet. The neuronet is trained successfully with the central government debt data from June 30, 1996 to December 31, 2016, provided by Ministry of Finance, Japan, in quarterly manner. Numerical experiments show four different trends of TCGD: slightly increasing trend, sharply increasing trend, decreasing-increasing trend and decreasing trend. The most possibility is that the TCGD increases slightly in short term. Furthermore, we conduct a relatively longer-term (i.e., twenty-four quarters) projection with the most possibility.