Comment on “Has Abe's Womanomics Worked?”

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/aepr.12204
• Author: Ayako Kondo
• Published date: 01 January 2018
• Date: 01 January 2018

Comment on “Has Abe’s Womanomics

Worked?”

Ayako KONDO†

The University of Tokyo

JEL codes: J13, J21, J31

Accepted: 11 October 2017

Since Japan’s working age population is shrinking while the elderly population is still

growing, increasing female labor supply without lowering fertility is a very important

policy goal. Hence, Abe administration has been trying to support working mothers by

increasing the supply of childcare and reducing overly long working hours for both

men and women, and to promote women in the workplace by setting an explicit target

for the ratio of female managers.

Nagase (2018) evaluates how effective these policies were, by applying the

difference-in-difference method to individual level data obtained from the Labor Force

Survey. This ambitious paper tries to estimate both the effect of childcare supplies and

other “womanomics”policies on the labor supply of married women. Since existing

studies tend to focus on a single policy (e.g. Asai et al., 2015 focus on the effect of

childcare capacities), it is a quite novel attempt to evaluate multiple policy changes in a

comprehensive way.

Nagase’s Table 2 shows that both the supply of day care and other nationwide

womanomics policies increased the employment of married women. While the effects

are larger for women with young children, the effects for married women without chil-

dren are also significantly positive. This result implies that policies to support working

mothers not only affect women who already have children, but also prospective

mothers. However, the effects of childcare supply and other nationwide policies on the

probability of regular full-time employment are different. While the increased childcare

supply has a positive effect for all married women including those without young chil-

dren, the nationwide policy affected only those with young children.

Nagase (2018) also analyzes the effects of womanomics policies on working hours

for both men and women, by full-time status. I find it quite interesting to contrast the

effects for fathers and mothers, as the overly long working hours of men are often

blamed for discouraging their spouses’labor supply.

The effect on womanomics policies on working hours is negative for female regular

full-time employees, especially for those with young children. Furthermore,

†Correspondence: Ayako Kondo, Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1

Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan. Email: akondo@iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp

104 © 2018 Japan Center for Economic Research

doi: 10.1111/aepr.12204 Asian Economic Policy Review (2018) 13, 104–105