Analysis of the inducements for international labor movement among Highly Skilled in East Asia
─ Focusing on the movement of Korean IT engineers to Japan from the 1980s to until 2010─
2021 Volume 39 Issue 2 Pages 59-70
Details
2021 Volume 39 Issue 2 Pages 59-70
The number of foreign IT engineers working in Japan has significantly increased in 2000s. In particular, the increase in IT engineers from China and South Korea was remarkable. What was the inducement for the international labor mobility of Highly Skilled workers from East Asia to Japan?
In this paper, I focused on South Korea, where the government trained young people in its own country as IT engineers and actively send them out to Japan. There were two major background factors: first, due to Koreaʼs high university enrollment rate, university graduates were oversupplied in the labor market; second, the 1997 IMF currency crisis overlapped so that the youth unemployment rate deteriorated sharply.
As a countermeasure against a strong Yen in 1980s, the Japanese IT industry selected South Korea as one of its offshore partners. Business and technical tie-ups with a Japanese companies in the 1980s formed a corridor between Japan and Korea and it led to the expansion in 2000s.
In addition to factors on the Korean side, the foreign IT engineer acceptance policy on the Japanese side was behind the expansion of international labor mobility in the 2000s.
