Editor's introduction to the special issue on ‘The Impact of Government Policies on Household Welfare in Asia’

• Published date: 01 December 2023
• Author: Charles Yuji Horioka
• Date: 01 December 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0106.12443

EDITORIAL

Editor's introduction to the special

issue on ‘The Impact of Government Policies

on Household Welfare in Asia’

This issue of the Pacific Economic Review is a special issue on ‘The Impact of Government

Policies on Household Welfare in Asia’and is in the field of household economics (also called

family economics). Household economics is not one of the most well-established subfields

of economics, but it is an important one that covers all decisions made by households

from consumption, saving, portfolio allocation, schooling and labour supply to marriage,

divorce, fertility, housework, child care, parental care and bequests and other intergenerational

transfers.

This issue collects three excellent papers on the impact of various government policies on

household welfare in Asia. The first paper is ‘Impacts of enterprise zones on local households

in Vietnam’by Tien Manh Vu and Hiroyuki Yamada. The Vietnamese government relied on

the establishment of enterprise zones as a way of encouraging economic development, and Vu

and Yamada tested what impact these zones had on household welfare by skilfully combining

data from Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey and the Establishment Census, which

contains information on enterprise zones. Their estimation results show that the establishment

of enterprise zones is associated with higher household incomes, an increase in private property

prices, and an increase in working hours but that they do not have a significant impact on

household living expenditures, school attendance and employment of those aged 7–17, or

on health outcomes.

Second, the paper by Ryo Sakamoto entitled ‘Family bargaining over parental leave: A col-

lective household model with endogenous gender power’develops a dynamic collective house-

hold model and analyses household decisions on parental leave-sharing between spouses,

resource allocation, home production and labour supply. It finds that whether husbands take

parental leave will depend on the bargaining positions of husbands and wives and that hus-

bands will not take parental leave if the wife's initial bargaining power is sufficiently low. This

finding has important policy implications because it implies that introducing parental leave pol-

icies for both genders will not necessarily induce husbands to take parental leave and that

simultaneous measures to increase wives' bargaining power are necessary to induce husbands

to take parental leave.

The analysis in this paper is purely theoretical but it is highly relevant in the case of Asian

countries where women's bargaining power within the family tends to be lower than in Western

countries, and it is especially relevant in the case of Japan, whose government is currently try-

ing to encourage husbands to take paternal leave as a way of easing the burden of childcare on

wives and increasing the fertility rate. For example, in March 2023, Japanese Prime Minister

Fumio Kishida announced that the Japanese government will aim to raise the percentage of

fathers who take paternity leave to 50% by fiscal 2025 and to 85% by fiscal 2030 as a way of

Received: 28 November 2023 Accepted: 29 November 2023

DOI: 10.1111/1468-0106.12443

Pac Econ Rev. 2023;28:591–592. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/paer © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd. 591