August 15, 2016
This short piece on Japan’s GDP growth reminded me that I wanted to post a graph showing the rise in Japan’s employment rate under Abe. Here’s the basic picture showing the employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) for people between the ages of 16 and 64 since 2000.
As can seen, Japan’s EPOP fell following the 2001 recession. It had made up lost ground by 2005 and continued to rise until 2007. It stagnated for roughly two years and then rose somewhat before starting to drop again in 2011. It was falling when Abe took over in December of 2012.
Since then the EPOP has risen by 2.5 percentage points. This is a huge gain that would be equivalent to another 6.2 million jobs in the United States. Japan’s growth has certainly not be inspiring under Abe, but this increase in employment is quite impressive. By this measure, Abenomics has been very successful.
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