This project offers a comprehensive look at aging policies across East Asia, where a demographic dividend fuelled rapid growth and is now aging into a lower-speed economy. With a comprehensive look at numerous East Asian societies, including China, Japan, Korea, and other regions, the book is rich in comparative insights and strategies into what is effective for policymakers and employers. As the Asian century begins, this book will be an invaluable resource for economists, policymakers and demographers.

This book examines the relationship between retirement and health of older people in Japan’s super-aging society and provides a key to understanding the remarkable longevity of the population. It also furnishes new evidence in this research field where the findings have been conflicting and the detailed causal mechanism has not been clarified for many years. For that purpose, a large-scale survey was used, “The Longitudinal Survey of Middle-Aged and Elderly Persons,” which was conducted in Japan from 2005 to 2015 with 34,240 respondents aged 50–59 years in the first sample. Using this longitudinal survey, which focused on people just before retirement, and rigorous causal inference including instrumental variable and panel estimation, several research questions were tested. Specifically, existing literature does not provide sufficient findings about the heterogeneity in the effect of retirement on health. Thus, we have questions which should be addressed: does retirement affect health immediately or with delay; does the lifestyle before retirement matter for post-retirement health; and which is better for health retiring early or late? The lack of this viewpoint is believed to have led to the conflicting previous findings. If we know the answers to the questions, we would be able to understand the mechanisms between retirement and health, and prepare more properly for better retirement life. Showing the results of the testing of these questions, this book provides readers, researchers, and policymakers a comprehensive understanding of the retirement–health relationship and a suggestion for an effective labor and health policy in an aging society.

The population of Asia is growing both larger and older. Demographically the most important continent on the world, Asia's population, currently estimated to be 4.2 billion, is expected to increase to about 5.9 billion by 2050. Rapid declines in fertility, together with rising life expectancy, are altering the age structure of the population so that in 2050, for the first time in history, there will be roughly as many people in Asia over the age of 65 as under the age of 15. It is against this backdrop that the Division of Behavioral and Social Research at the U.S. National Institute on Aging (NIA) asked the National Research Council (NRC), through the Committee on Population, to undertake a project on advancing behavioral and social research on aging in Asia. Aging in Asia: Findings from New and Emerging Data Initiatives is a peer-reviewed collection of papers from China, India, Indonesia, Japan, and Thailand that were presented at two conferences organized in conjunction with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy, Indonesian Academy of Sciences, and Science Council of Japan; the first conference was hosted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, and the second conference was hosted by the Indian National Science Academy in New Delhi. The papers in the volume highlight the contributions from new and emerging data initiatives in the region and cover subject areas such as economic growth, labor markets, and consumption; family roles and responsibilities; and labor markets and consumption.

Japan's economy stumbled in the 1990s, after four decades of rapid growth that transformed Japan into a wealthy country at the world's technological frontier. This volume explores the forces that will drive structural and institutional change in Japan over the next decade.

This book reappraises the Japanese employment system, characterized by such practices as the periodic recruiting of new graduates, lifetime employment and seniority-based wages, which were praised as sources of high productivity and flexibility for Japanese firms during the period of high economic growth from the middle of the 1950s until the burst of bubbles in the early 1990s. The prolonged stagnation after the bubble burst induced an increasing number of people to criticize the Japanese employment system as a barrier to the structural changes needed to allow the economy to adjust to the new environment, with detractors suggesting that such a system only serves to protect the vested interests of incumbent workers and firms. By investigating what caused the long stagnation of the Japanese economy, this book examines the validity of this currently dominant view about the Japanese employment system. The rigorous theoretical and empirical analyses presented in this book provide readers with deep insights into the nature of the current Japanese labor market and its macroeconomic impacts.

This report shows that Japanese employers and the government go to considerable lengths to avoid the displacement of regular workers while also providing considerable lengths to avoid the displacement of regular workers while also providing considerable support to displaced workers.