The Cabinet Office will probably maintain its upbeat assessment of Japan's economy in its monthly report due out Friday, according to government sources.

The sources said Wednesday that the report for May is expected to feature the same wording used in the April report, which stated that, "The economy continues recovering steadily, with improvement in the corporate sector spreading."

The phrase "recovering steadily" would appear in the Cabinet Office report for the fifth consecutive month.

Heizo Takenaka, economic and fiscal policy minister, will submit the report to a meeting of Cabinet ministers involved in economic issues.

The Cabinet Office said Tuesday in a preliminary report on the nation's gross domestic product that GDP posted an annualized expansion of 5.6 percent in real terms in the January-March quarter.

Although the strong figure signals that the economy remains on a recovery path, the Cabinet Office has apparently opted to hold off from revising upward the growth rate due to weak economic data, including a seasonally adjusted 3.2 percent slide in core private-sector machinery orders in March.