An Assessment of Abenomics from the Labor Market Perspective
Daiji Kawaguchi, Keisuke Kawata, Takahiro Toriyabe
Abstract
The present paper documents the change in employment and wages between 2012 and 2020 when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe implemented his economic policy popularly known as Abenomics. Despite population aging that by itself would have decreased the employment rate by 2.8 percentage points, the aggregate employment rate increased from 56.5% in 2012 to 60.7% in 2019, largely because of a substantial increase in the 25–64‐year‐old female employment rate, which was especially profound in the health and welfare industry. The real wage declined by 1.8% from 2012 to 2017, of which 1.4% is explained by changes in worker composition, particularly the increase in female workers. We also assess the impact of COVID‐19 on the labor market in 2020 and discuss its impact on the long term labor market trend.