Despite its low unemployment rate, the recent shift in the Japanese Beveridge curve indicates increased labor mismatch. This paper quantifies the age, employment-type (full or part-time), and occupational mismatch in the Japanese labor market following Sahin and others (2013). Between April 2000 and April 2013, the age mismatch has steadily declined while the occupational and employmenttype mismatch has shown a countercyclical pattern, showing a sharp increase during the global financial crisis. Occupational mismatch accounted for approximtely 20-40 percent of the recent rise in the unemployment rate in Japan. The magnitude was comparable to that of the U.K. and the U.S.

Analyzes the 1970s downturn in the labor market for college-educated manpower, considers consequences for educational institutions, and explores policies for alleviating the situation. Bibliogs

All over the world, open innovation is emerging and requires much more interactions between different actors with different organizational cultures: large firms and SMEs (i.e. industry), universities and research institutions (i.e. academia), as well as national and regional authorities for building the legal or incentive framework of innovation (i.e government). Certainly, flows of knowledge between these three spheres, which are also known as the triple helix, have always existed; but what appears to be new in an open innovation environment is the overlapping of their missions. In many areas such multi-actor interactions with overlapping roles did not emerge spontaneously, as was the case with the United States. Based on robust cases studied by researchers and practical experiences of personnel involved in innovation at public or private institutions, this book successively discusses the policy framework in Europe and Japan, the new role for universities due to intellectual property reform or technology transfer promotion, the new challenges for firms in terms of licensing, patents, corporate venturing, including entrepreneurship, incubation, venture capital or cross-industry knowledge sharing. All issues addressed in this book are clearly those toward regional innovation policies and practices that are open in nature. It contains descriptions and analysis of the various approaches taken by industrial, governmental, and academic players in various regions of Japan (Tohoku, Tokyo) and Europe (France, Belgium). The mix of theoretical and empirical material collected in this book was first presented at an international symposium in Tokyo. The dynamics of regional innovation is an on-going issue, and we are still standing at the threshold of this field of research. It is exactly why such a book is needed now.

Since the late 1980s, Brazilians of Japanese descent have been "return" migrating to Japan as unskilled foreign workers. With an immigrant population currently estimated at roughly 280,000, Japanese Brazilians are now the second largest group of foreigners in Japan. Although they are of Japanese descent, most were born in Brazil and are culturally Brazilian. As a result, they have become Japan's newest ethnic minority. Drawing upon close to two years of multisite fieldwork in Brazil and Japan, Takeyuki Tsuda has written a comprehensive ethnography that examines the ethnic experiences and reactions of both Japanese Brazilian immigrants and their native Japanese hosts. In response to their socioeconomic marginalization in their ethnic homeland, Japanese Brazilians have strengthened their Brazilian nationalist sentiments despite becoming members of an increasingly well-integrated transnational migrant community. Although such migrant nationalism enables them to resist assimilationist Japanese cultural pressures, its challenge to Japanese ethnic attitudes and ethnonational identity remains inherently contradictory. Strangers in the Ethnic Homeland illuminates how cultural encounters caused by transnational migration can reinforce local ethnic identities and nationalist discourses.

Since the oil crisis of the 1970s, increased labor market flexibility seems to have become an indispensable ingredient of economic success. This book examines the critical issues that affect labor market flexibility and job security in the main industrialized economies of the United States, Japan, West Germany, the United Kingdom, and Europe, in an attempt to more fully understand the complex forces at work within such labor markets. Employment Security and Labor Market Flexibility originated from The International Symposium on Labor Market Flexibility in Yokohama, Japan, in 1986, in which scholars in economics, industrial relations, and labor law scholars scrutinized the similarities and differences of the labor markets in these countries. They focused on three main topics: wage flexibility in response to changing economic conditions, the legal and institutional framework for employment security, and international comparison of employment adjustment. Comparison of wage flexibility as well as numerical and functional flexibility among these countries were examined by both qualitative and quantitative analyses. The labor market cannot be treated in the same way as other markets because it deals directly with human beings who are less likely to obey the immutable laws of the market mechanism. Nevertheless, Kazutoshi Koshiro asserts that it is still important to build a framework on which to understand and assess the role of labor flexibility in the competitive process, and it is with this framework in mind that these chapters have been assembled into one volume. Individual chapters compare the relative flexibility of compensation and employment over the business cycle in the United States with that of Japan; analyze the relative flexibility of Japanese wages; unravel some of the underlying forces that comprise the employment security situation in the United States; study the important relationship between economic conditions and the labor market and explain the difference between the employment protection legislation of the United States on the one hand, and Europe and Japan, on the other; and compare the nature of labor markets and employment adjustment techniques of the United States, Europe, and Japan.

The book examines the effect of various public policies on economic performance in Japan. Various public policies include tax policy, regulation, macroeconomic policy, labour policy and some others. Many fields regarding economic performance are covered in this book: savings, portfolio choice, housings, investments, cost of capital, taxes, unemployment, wages, inequality, etc. Emphasis is placed on the examination of the two factor markets, namely, the capital and labour markets in Japan.