2015 Volume 9 Pages 55-68
This paper examines people’s attitudes toward public spending on education in Japan. It is well known that Japan has the smallest public education expenditure relative to GDP among the OECD countries, and this may yield unequal opportunities in education. The tax burden in Japan is small compared to those in OECD countries, and there may be no room to distribute public spending on education without a tax increase. The following three issues should be considered concurrently: people’s attitudes toward public expenditure on education, people’s attitudes toward the balance between tax burden and public services, and people’s trust in the government. In order to find simple patterns in these attitudinal responses, latent-class analysis was employed using data captured through the Japanese General Social Surveys conducted in 2010. As a result, four latent classes were found. The largest class accounted for over 40% of the sample, and members of this group think that the government should increase public expenditure on education and social security, even if tax increases are required. The same group, however, distrusted the government. Trust in small-government policy seemed to be weak among the Japanese people, because in all the latent classes, the majority of people wanted the government to improve public services, even if this would require tax increases. However, those who preferred no improvement in public services and did not trust the government were more likely to have a lower-level socioeconomic background, even though they would be the beneficiaries of those services. People who did not have children were less likely to agree with increasing public expenditure on education, because among the Japanese people, child-birth and child-rearing might be considered individual rather than social issues.
