The Japanese labor policy has three sides: laborer protection, laborer union security and economic policy. Among these, the economic policy has been developed to complement Japanese employment practices. However, the typical Japanese employment practice is deteriorating due to the influence of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) and environmental changes accompanying globalization. From the 1990s onward, work styles and employment practices regarding laborers have diversified, and non-regular employees are on the rise. As a result, the labor policy should correspond to diversified labor problems. Institutional impoverishment is prevalent because the conventional labor policy was designed systematically subject to the employment stability of regular employees. However, it's quite difficult to predict how a labor policy will correspond to various problems. Technical innovations in AI (Artificial Intelligesnce) and robotics will develop rapidly from now on. At the same time, the labor force will decrease due to the declining birthrate and growing proportion of elderly people. I predict that labor problems will diversify even further in the future, so we must boldly convert our 20th century labor policies to meet 21th century needs.

The Japanese style of regular employment is one under which there are no limits on the duties, hours, or location of work; the employer can change these at will. Inasmuch as accepting employment at such an enterprise is tantamount to becoming a member of a corporate community, I refer to this Japanese style as “membership-based employment.” This is in contrast to the style seen in other countries, where the duties, hours, and location are ordinarily limited. I refer to this as “job-based employment.” Regular employees under the membership-based system have no right to limit their duties, to refuse overtime work, or to decline transfers to distant locations.

In 2017, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe boasted during a Diet speech of the achievements of his own economic policy. He said that, as the result of his Abenomics, the goals of economic growth and wage hikes had been achieved. He declared that what had been thought to be impossible was realized by his Abenomics, one goal after another. Based on this recognition, new policies were launched which form the principle of eliminating the distinction between regular and non-regular employees and applying equal pay for equal work. His policy was received favorably, but his recognition of the current situation includes things that do not match the facts. The economic growth rate that the government had targeted has not been achieved yet. The employment situation is improving, but economic growth, nominal wages and prices are not as good as expected by the government. This paper analyzes basic conditions of the Japanese economy as a premise of economic policy, and looks into the future of the employment system.

Since the amendment of the immigration act in 1990, the Japanese foreign workers policy had been guided by two major principles. One is an active acceptance of professionals and engineers (principle A). And the other is a rejection and restriction of manual and unskilled workers (principle B). After a large-scale reamendment of the immigration act in 2009, however, the Japanese government started to introduce new kinds of foreign workers policies, which deviated from the above-mentioned two principles in a fundamental way. This paper investigates the reason why such a sudden policy change had been carried out during this decade. The paper analyzes the transcripts of speeche acts made by members in the Cabinet office's major policy-making meetings, such as the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy (Keizai Zaisei Shimonkaigi), and shows that some of the members in the meeting tried to destroy past principles by challenging the validity of the concept of manual and unskilled workers and abusing the concept of highly skilled talent in order to open the way to accept unskilled foreign workers.

Recently, one of the most important policy issues in Japan is the work style reform. The reform is necessary because the country suffers from (1) a shortage of human resources due to population reduction, and (2) high unemployment due to rapid technological progress. “The Action Plan for the Realization of Work Style Reform” proposed by the Japanese government in March 2017 is regarded as a solution to these future social changes. But the reform will also change working conditions and job security. Therefore, we need to consider some new measures to realize the stable employment of workers. In this paper, we will discuss several key economic concepts which are important in thinking about future employment policies, including the trade-off relationship among multiple policy objectives.

For decades, new or additional construction of manufacturing establishments in the central area of Japan's capital region (Tokyo metropolitan area) had been banned due to the “Act Concerning the Industry Restriction in the Built-up Area of the National Capital Region.” In this paper, I examine the effect of the act, completely abolished in 2002, using district-level panel data of a manufacturing census. In order to identify the effect, Difference-in-Differences estimation is employed, regarding the partial abolishment in 1999 as a natural experiment and comparing the changes between the deregulated area as a treatment group and yet-regulated area as a control group. The estimation shows significant increase of the density of establishments and shipment value per establishment within the deregulated area, so that the act might have failed to achieve an efficient land use in the region.