The Japanese Labour Force

The Japanese labour force has risen for the first time in eight years as women and those over 60 are drawn back to the jobs market in a sign of the strength of Japan’s cyclical recovery, now in its fifth year.The willingness of those who left the jobs market to re-enter also shows the mechanisms by which the labour market might respond to the challenges of an ageing society, which is shrinking

Japan A Suitable Place For Children?

The Japanese newspaper Asahi this weekend published the results of a survey carried out on behalf of the Japenese cabinet office into attitudes towards having children in Japan, South Korea, France, Sweden and the US.Whereas in Europe and the United States respondents tended to indicate they expected to have all the children they wanted, of those Japanese interviewed who said that they want to

Mild Deflation Persists

The yen fell yesterday against the dollar after Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe and internal affairs minister Heizo Takenaka both stated that mild deflation persists in Japan. Commentators are speculating that the government may be just trying to delay an earlier end of the BOJ's zero-rates policy, but accept that there is some truth the pace and degree of the forceast increase in prices is

Better, or Worse-Off?

Most people in Japan seem to think that their living standards have deteriorated under Koizumi. That is the surprise finding in the latest Asahi survey. Apart from his commment that "Japan's economy is on solid ground and deflation in its last throes" (which I don't fopr one moment accept), he makes some worthwhile points:A funny thing is happening on the road to applying ``Reaganomics'' to

Japanese Trade

Japan's long term economic surplus continues to weaken, it is down by 11.9% year on year. Of course the main culprit is the rising cost of oil imports (on which Japan is heavily dependent). Exports rose 18.1 percent, but imports rose 25.2 percent to a record 5.8414 trillion yen, continuing a string of double-digit rises since April 2005.It is this part of the process we need to watch, as any

Japanese Labour Market: Running on Half-Empty?

Well, things certainly have been moving quite quickly in Japan recently. The recovery seems to have just started to gain some traction, and now we are being told that internal capacity limits may be being reached due to the presence oF labour shortages:"Japan’s large manufacturers are short of capacity for the first time since the bubble era of the early 1990s, while employers across the country

D Day is Here

Well, not quite, since they aren't actually thinking of raising interest rates anytime soon, but...... ultra loose monetary policy is over (for the time being). Now we get to see what happens next:The Bank of Japan on Thursday asserted its independence by ending an unorthodox ultra-loose monetary policy and shifting to a policy of targeting the overnight call rate.The bank said it would take “a