The government has implemented 205 out of 599 proposals in a three-year deregulation plan approved by the Cabinet in March, Nobuteru Ishihara, state minister in charge of deregulatory affairs, said Friday.

Eighty-eight of the proposals were implemented ahead of schedule, Ishihara told a Cabinet meeting while presenting a report on the plan.

Among the rules scrapped were those requiring the top managing director of a hospital be a medical doctor and the number of part-timers not surpass 20 percent of total workers in a kindergarten, Ishihara said.

Another step was to ease the qualifications required of foreign information-technology engineers working in Japan.

The report notes that the Japan Business Federation (Nippon Keidanren) handed a list of 114 additional deregulatory proposals to the government in May in the wake of the Cabinet's endorsement in March of the three-year plan.

The government is ready to implement 50 of the proposals from the nation's largest business lobby by the end of the current fiscal year, according to the report.

The administration of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has said deregulation is one of the three pillars of his structural reform campaign along with changes to the financial and taxation systems.

Ishihara was to report progress in the government's deregulatory policies to a meeting of Koizumi's Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy later in the day.