Abstract
This paper reconsiders Estelle James and Gail Benjamin's important paper, Educational Distribution and Income Redistribution through Education in Japan, The Journal of Human Resources, Vol.22, No.4(1987).James and Benjamin have calculated the distribution of enrolments and taxes by lifetime income within a cohort to draw inferences about redistribution through education in Japan.Their paper draw heavily on my data presented in Kikuchi(1978).In this paper we recalculate the same kind of data for 1976-1987 according to the method as devised in their paper.We conclude that the changing direction of income redistribution is the reverse which they have diagnosed on Japanese higher education in 1976.It cannot be denied that private universities have become more income biased;hence subsidies to private institutions have become less income redistributive than those to the national and public sector.While some skewing of enrolment toward the upper classes in Japanese national and public universities remains, progressive taxes imply that government spending has been redistributing real income from rich to poor to a limited extent, with the middle class receiving a relatively small net benefit.
