Mitsumaru Kumagai is Chief Economist at Daiwa Institute of Research. He has served on several government committees including the Ministry of Finance Council on Customs, Tariff, Foreign Exchange and Other Transactions (2002-11), and was a visiting researcher for the Budget Committee Research Bureau at the House of Councilors (2010 and 2012). He was also a member of the expert committee for the Cabinet Secretariat's Blue Ribbon Panel on Improvement of Investment and Risk Management of Public & Quasi-Public Funds (2013). In 2015 he was appointed a committee member on the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications' Information and Communications Council. He has served as a committee member on the Cabinet Secretariat's Meeting for the Promotion of IR since 2017. He was a visiting professor at Osaka University of Economics (2013-16), and a regular commentator on TV Tokyo's World Business Satellite, Japan's leading business news program. He placed first seven times as economist and forex analyst in various surveys. Mr. Kumagai received both his bachelor's and master's degrees in law in 1989 and 1993 from Tokyo University. In 2016 he completed the Harvard Business School Advanced Management Program.