Finance Minister Masajuro Shiokawa said Tuesday he was confident the government will fulfill its pledge to slash subsidies for special government-affiliated corporations by 1 trillion yen in the fiscal 2002 budget.

"We already saw a decline of some 580 billion yen in ministerial budget requests (for such corporations) for the coming fiscal year. I plan to achieve additional cuts of between 300 billion yen and 500 billion yen," the finance chief told the House of Representatives Budget Committee.

The Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy, an advisory panel for Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, included curtailing fiscal 2002 expenditures for such corporations by 1 trillion yen in a package of reforms to be pursued by the administration that was adopted earlier this year.

The government also plans to promote consolidation or privatization of special corporations, with emphasis placed on reforms at seven of them.

They are Japan Highway Public Corp., Metropolitan Expressway Public Corp., Hanshin Expressway Public Corp., Honshu-Shikoku Bridge Authority, Urban Development Corp., Government Housing Loan Corp. and Japan National Oil Corp.

Nobuteru Ishihara, minister in charge of administrative reform, told the budget committee he will "pay the utmost attention in order to not make it reform for the sake of reform, or to make such corporations even bigger."

In connection with the reform of Government Housing Loan Corp., Chikage Ogi, minister of land, infrastructure and transport, told the committee, "It will be difficult to make it a completely private organization all at once.

"It would be inevitable to postpone it by several years, by conducting some partial privatization first."