April 01, 2015
The media regularly report the mixed signals from Japan on the state of its recovery (here, for example), but for some reason, they never seem to mention the state of the labor market. The news here is actually quite impressive. Since Shinzo Abe took over as prime minister in 2012 the employment to population ratio (EPOP) for adults under 65 rose by 2.4 percentage points. By comparison, the rise in the EPOP in United States over the same period, which has frequently been celebrated as a boom, was just 1.6 percentage points. Japan’s EPOP is now 2.1 percentage points above its pre-recession level. By contrast, the EPOP in the United States is 3.2 percentage points lower for this group of workers.
In Washington policy debates, 90 percent of the story is what adjective gets applied to a particular set of facts (as in the “crushing” burden of the baby boomers’ retirement). I know that I am not important enough to determine which adjective gets used, but I can take advantage of the adjectives used by others. If the United States has experienced an employment boom in the last two years, then Japan has experienced something better than a boom. It is remarkable that no news outlet has chosen to mention it.
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