Kuroda wins second term at BoJ

Tokyo: Japan's parliament approved Haruhiko Kuroda for a second term as central bank governor on Friday, with a mandate to battle deflation and pep up the world´s third-biggest economy.

Handpicked by Shinzo Abe to steer the former economic powerhouse out of a dangerous cycle of falling prices, Kuroda has guided the key monetary plank of the prime minister´s vaunted "Abenomics" economic policy.

Now 73, the ex-president of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is on course to become the longest-serving Bank of Japan (BoJ) governor if he completes a full second five-year term. Kuroda took the helm in March 2013 with a mandate to deploy what was called a monetary "bazooka" to stoke life into the moribund Japanese economy. He has overseen a policy of ultra-aggressive monetary easing, adopting in January 2016 the BoJ´s first-ever negative interest rates, effectively charging lenders to park their cash at the central bank.