Comment on “Has Abe's Womanomics Worked?”

• Date: 01 January 2018
• Published date: 01 January 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/aepr.12203

Comment on “Has Abe’s Womanomics

Worked?”

Masako KUROSAWA†

National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies

JEL codes: J13, J21, J31

Accepted: 12 October 2017

Abe Cabinet’s key component of the “third arrow,”structural reforms, is “woma-

nomics”which aims to boost economic growth through reforms and policies to accel-

erate women’s involvement in the labor market. Written by an author who has done

extensive empirical work in the field, Nagase (2018) is an important paper which

attempts to estimate comprehensively the effect of the Abe Cabinet’s efforts on married

women’s labor supply and wages by applying a difference in differences (DID) strategy

on microdata from the Labor Force Survey.

One of the unique features of Nagase (2018) is that it looks at the various aspects

of the way married women are involved in the labor market: participation and perma-

nent-contract regular employment (seishain) probabilities, working hours, and wages.

The policies in focus are the expansion of childcare supply and everything else taken

together whose impact is examined across gender and youngest child’s age, enabling

Nagase to examine extensively the workings of womanomics.

There are many findings in Nagase (2018), but the most important contribution, in

my view, is that it has clarified where the challenges lie in going forward in shifting the

Japanese society toward one that is more inclusive of women. Since these views are not

necessarily shared with Nagase, let me elaborate below.

First, Nagase finds that womanomics policies in general, together with expansion of

accredited infant day care, have succeeded in raising participation, as well as seishain

employment. In particular, a large and significant positive impact of the DID estimate

on the seishain probability found for new mothers suggests that womanomics policies

have been successful in enabling women to hold on to seishain jobs after having a

child. Women’s quit rates at childbirth had stayed stubbornly high for the past

20 years, but Nagase (2018) clearly shows that Japan continues its move to a stage

where firms are increasingly able to retain women seishain even after they become

mothers.

However, Nagase also finds that DID estimates on seishain probability are not sig-

nificant for mothers with older children and, unlike the participation probability, the

†Correspondence: Masako Kurosawa, National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS),

7-22-1 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106-8677, Japan. Email: mkurosawa@grips.ac.jp

102 © 2018 Japan Center for Economic Research

doi: 10.1111/aepr.12203 Asian Economic Policy Review (2018) 13, 102–103