Governance of Livelihood Security Systems : Reconsidering Income Poverty and Disparity

Abstract

The Lehman shock and the triple disaster on March 11, 2011 laid bare Japan's socio-economic vulnerabilities. Yet even before being hit by the Lehman shock, Japanese society was already beset by a host of serious social problems, such as a high rate of suicides (more than 30,000 yearly for over 10 years), one of the world's lowest levels of fertility, and one of the highest, and most deeply gendered, poverty rates among OECD countries. This paper introduces the concept of governance to studies of livelihood security systems, and focuses on income poverty among the faces of vulnerability. After reconsidering the effectiveness of income poverty as an indicator of social inclusion/exclusion, it conducts an international comparison of the effects of various functional equivalents to income transfer schemes, as well as poverty reduction rates of income transfer. It also refers to recent studies on regional economic disparities in Japan. The paper concludes that tax and social security schemes in Japan are not only dysfunctional but "reverse-functional," and are gender-biased in favoring male-breadwinner households over other types of households. Through such gender bias, farming or fishing villages receive cold treatment because almost all able-bodied persons work in the majority of their households.