Dec 15 (aljazeera.com) - Japan’s small hotels and restaurants continue to suffer from financing strains caused by the COVID-19 crisis, a survey has shown, complicating the central bank’s decision on when to end pandemic-relief funding programmes.
An index gauging funding conditions among small and midsized hotels and restaurants hit minus 33 in the three months to December, according to a full version of the Bank of Japan’s (BOJ) Tankan business confidence survey published on Tuesday.
While the reading was better than minus 46 in the previous survey, it showed that far more firms saw financing conditions as severe compared with those that felt they were easy.
The plight of small, service-sector firms highlights the widening gap among companies that weathered the pandemic’s hit, and those still reeling from the fallout.
An index measuring funding conditions of companies of all sizes and industries improved in the three months to December, an outline of the Tankan survey released on Monday showed.
The results are among factors the BOJ will scrutinise at this week’s meeting in deciding whether to scale back emergency funding deployed last year to combat a pandemic-induced cash crunch, which expires in March 2022.
