Toshiaki Tachibanaki and Atsuhiro Taki emphasise several institutional features in Japan which differ from those in Euro-American countries: for example, the permanent employment and seniority system in wages and promotion, the dual structure, Keiretsu transactions, the main bank system, and intercorporate shareholding. This book examines in particular the distinction between long-run and short-run contractual relationships which produced such features. It presents both the positive and the negative evaluations of the factor market. Exploring the similarities and interdependencies between two important and idiosyncratic factor markets in Japan, this book brings data to hand which until now has only been available in specialist journals.

This book reappraises the Japanese employment system, characterized by such practices as the periodic recruiting of new graduates, lifetime employment and seniority-based wages, which were praised as sources of high productivity and flexibility for Japanese firms during the period of high economic growth from the middle of the 1950s until the burst of bubbles in the early 1990s. The prolonged stagnation after the bubble burst induced an increasing number of people to criticize the Japanese employment system as a barrier to the structural changes needed to allow the economy to adjust to the new environment, with detractors suggesting that such a system only serves to protect the vested interests of incumbent workers and firms. By investigating what caused the long stagnation of the Japanese economy, this book examines the validity of this currently dominant view about the Japanese employment system. The rigorous theoretical and empirical analyses presented in this book provide readers with deep insights into the nature of the current Japanese labor market and its macroeconomic impacts.

This work concerns transformation processes in labour relations and in production systems in the 1980s. It describes new industrial and occupational patterns, as well as technological progress and the implications of the end of the Welfare State. Old practices are assessed.

The global impact of Asian production of the wage goods consumed in North America and Europe is only now being recognized, and is far from being understood. Asian women, most only recently urbanized and in the waged work force, are at the center of a process of intensive labor for minimal wages that has upended the entire global economy. First published in 1997, this prescient study is the best available summary of this crucial process as it took hold at the very end of the twentieth century. This new edition brings the discussion up to 2011 with an extensive introduction by world-famous economist Jayati Ghosh of New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.Drawing on extensive data concerning the laboring conditions of women workers and peasant women, this ambitious book provides a theoretical interpretation of the rapidly changing economic conditions in the contemporary global economy and particularly in Asia, and their consequences for women. It is based on prolonged field research in India, Bangladesh, and Japan, combined with a broad comparative study of currents in international feminism.Peter Custers reasserts the relevance of Marxist concepts for understanding processes of socio-economic change in Asia and the world, but argues forcefully that these concepts need to be enlarged to include the perspective of feminist theoreticians. In the process, he assesses the theoretical relevance of several currents in international feminism, including ecofeminism, the German feminist school, and socialist feminism. With its strong theoretical framework, supported by massive amounts of evidence, this important book will interest all those involved in women’s studies, social movements, economics, sociology, and social and economic theory.

As labor input in Japan shrinks with population aging, capital accumulation and productivity gains will drive growth over the medium-term. At the same time, a changing global landscape calls for a shift in export-oriented investment toward new markets and a new generation of products, as well as increased investment by domestically-oriented firms. What policies could be adopted to help firms adjust to the imperatives of the post-crisis global economy and boost medium-term growth? Using disaggregated data, this paper investigates the determinants of investment and R&D spending by Japanese firms. The results suggest that policies could usefully focus on four areas. First, raising the return on investment, including through reforms to the tax code. Second, decreasing uncertainty through improved risk management by firms and by bolstering the business climate. Third, improving SME access to finance, notably by encouraging venture capital investment in innovative areas and more risk-based lending. And fourth, reducing excess leverage and supporting corporate restructuring to enable new investments to flourish.

The prevailing view of industrialization has focussed on technology, capital, entrepreneurship and the institutions that enabled them to be deployed. Labour was often equated with other factors of production, and assigned a relatively passive role. Yet it was labour absorption and the improvement of the quality of labour over the course of several centuries that underscored the timing, pace and quality of global industrialization. While science and technology developed in the West and whereas the use of fossil fuels, especially coal and oil, were vital to this process, the more recent history has been underpinned by the development of comparatively resource- and energy-saving technology, without which the diffusion of industrialization would not have been possible. The labour-intensive, resource-saving path, which emerged in East Asia under the influence of Western technology and institutions, and is diffusing across the world, suggests the most realistic route humans could take for a further diffusion of industrialization, which might respond to the rising expectations of living standards without catastrophic environmental degradation.

This book is a concerted attempt by economists to investigate and offer remedies for some of the difficulties associated with an ageing labor market.

Explores the mobilities of capital and labour in the contemporary global economy. Using an analytical framework around three dimensions related to the forms, institutions, and spatialities of mobility, it examines the interrelationships between mobilities of capital and labour at multiple levels of analyses.

This volume explains the salient features of the Japanese labour market. The key idea in this book is integrated segmentation. Emphasis is upon segmentation: on the demand side, within the educational system and, on supply side, monitoring costs which underlie labour contracts. Using long run official government statistical evidence, it is argued that what is peculiar to Japan is the integration of segmented labour markets. By virtue of segmentation the Japanese labour market is deeply competitive. By virtue of integration it is highly cooperative.

Data and anecdotal evidence suggest that Japan is suffering from labor shortages, which are large in an international perspective, have a negative impact on potential growth, and reduce the effectiveness of monetary and fiscal stimulus. This paper focuses on policy options to ease Japan’s labor shortages. In particular, we focus on possible measures to increase reliance on foreign labor. Other policy recommendations to deal with shortages include policies aimed at increasing female labor participation, encouraging wage growth, increasing investment, as well as training and other active labor market policies.