2012 Volume 12 Pages 128-140
At present, US military is stationed in Japan based on the Japan-US Security Treaty. There are civilians, called “USFJ employees”, working on the US military bases.
The purpose of this paper is to identify the existence of USFJ employees on the basis of treaty and to calculate economic effect on Okinawa brought by USFJ employees by input-output analysis method. USFJ employees brought 110.092 billion yen-economic effect to Okinawa in 2006. This amount occupies 1.9 % of 5 trillion and 766.8 billion yen for total Okinawa’s prefectural production in 2005.
As mentioned above, US military bases create a number of jobs for Okinawa which has a higher unemployment rate than the national average.
On the other hand, it is expected that US military transformation including site return of Futenma base will bring larger economic effect than ever by effectively utilizing these returned sites, so in the latter half of this paper, I overview the US military transformation and calculate USFJ employees’ economic loss caused by the base site return. Additionally, I analyze precedents for the site development and industries that Okinawa should develop in the future, and then discuss whether or not newly created job opportunities could be provided to USFJ employees even if base site return were actually conducted.
The contribution of this paper is to offer a Quantitative point of view on the controversy over Okinawa’s US military base-related problems in terms of USFJ employees.
