Author: Renu Kohli

India’s labour market is in for a vigorous shake up over the next few years. The inexorable march of market forces, and their interplay with the structural and political dynamics of the country, could end up drawing many unemployed persons into the job market.

India is still far from creating mass jobs in large-scale manufacturing. But over the medium term, absorbing such unutilised human capital will help preserve the economy’s competitiveness in an environment of rapid growth. Read more…

Authors: Sherry Tao Kong, Xin Meng and Dandan Zhang, Australia National University

The global financial crisis (GFC) reduced export orders sharply and led to a decline in China’s economic growth.  As China’s exporting industries are labour intensive and most likely to employ rural migrants, it was widely believed that the GFC has had significant negative impacts on the employment and/or wages of rural migrants.

Reflecting this, at the height of the crisis, laid-off Chinese migrant workers protested outside closed factories and millions lamented lost jobs and embarked on journeys home. Read more…

Author: Boonwara Sumano, University of London

The future of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member states is a source of considerable discussion, with economic recession, internal and interstate conflict, and environmental degradation remaining top concerns. This decade signals the increasing significance of another issue in the structure of member countries’ populations.

The ASEAN Statistical Yearbook 2008 reports that population in most ASEAN countries is declining. Read more…

Author: Kyoung-Hee Moon, Changwon National University

With the number of foreign residents in South Korea exceeding one million as of May 2009, many scholars, journalists, and bureaucrats claim that Korea has become a multiethnic or multicultural society. This idea needs to be put in proper perspective. The total number of foreign residents in Korea, the majority of whom are temporarily visiting migrants or students, accounts for only 2.2 per cent of the country’s total population. In addition, Chinese residents represent, at 57 per cent, the highest share of these foreign residents, and about half of these Chinese residents have Korean ancestry. Korean society is still largely ethnically homogeneous and racially distinctive, and the term ‘multiethnic Korea’ remains an unconvincing descriptor.

In addition, many Koreans are yet to accept that Korea is in the midst of a demographic shift. Read more…

Authors: Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya, Columbia University

Lagging employment recovery and continuing high levels of unemployment have marked the macroeconomic scenario in the United States. So it is natural that the United States, which chaired the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, would use its privileged position as the host to invite the US secretary of labour, a well-known union activist, to convene a meeting of the employment and labour ministers on the jobs situation prior to the next G20 heads of state meeting in Canada.

The macroeconomic aspects of the labour situation are indeed a proper focus of such a meeting. Read more…

Author: Cai Fang, CASS

At the beginning of 2009 the global financial crisis struck hard at the real economy of China. While the whole country suffered, not all regions suffered equally. Looking at two industrial cities on which the crisis had a very different impact helps to explain the reasons for the uneven effect of the crisis, and highlights opportunities for policy reform.

The city of Dongguan in Guangdong province provides a telling example of the severe shock experienced by migrant workers in the wake of the crisis. Dongguan is located in the Pearl River Delta Region which has a high concentration of export-oriented labor-intensive enterprises and migrant workers. As early as the second half of 2008 due to a sharp drop in export orders some enterprises in Dongguan, shut down while others substantially reduced production. As a result, a large proportion of migrant workers in the city lost their jobs. An official source indicated 20 million migrants returned home earlier than expected because of the fall in demand for exports. Read more…

Author: Tobias Harris

One policy area that could see cooperation between a DPJ-led government and the JCP (and the SDPJ) is the treatment of non-regular workers (mentioned here).

The JCP’s position on dispatch workers and other non-regular workers is clear: the party wants to ban the employment of temporary workers in manufacturing work, making an exception only for ‘specialized work.’ The DPJ’s position is a bit more vague, as the party has called for a fundamental revision of the Temporary Staffing Services Law, more support for jobseekers, and a higher minimum wage, but it is unclear how far the party will go in limiting a practice that Kan Naoto argued has contributed to a decline in Japan’s international competitiveness.

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Author: Aurelia George Mulgan

In January 2009, Japan’s former Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro (1982-87) reflected on the global strategic implications of the international financial crisis in an article published in the Yomiuri newspaper. In it, he observed that ‘the ongoing financial crisis has prompted the world to shift from a structure that relies heavily on the United States to a multipolar system that does not.’

The structural shift in the world order to multipolarity offers Japan a clear choice. Will it expand and strengthen its security contributions to the US alliance in order to buttress American primacy in East Asia, or will it seek to carve out a more independent regional and global role for itself, which takes account of declining American power? Professor Terumasa Nakanishi of Kyoto University has argued that the only option for Japan in the transition from a US-dominated world order to multipolarisation is to ‘stand as a pole’.

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Author: Peter Drysdale

Two weeks ago, on the eve of Kevin Rudd’s visit to Japan, Tomohiko Kato, a 25-year old high school drop-out and casual worker from Shizuoka, drove a truck into a crowded shopping mall in Akihabara, the popular electronics shopping district in Tokyo, slaughtering 7 people and wounding many others in a stabbing rampage that followed.

Another young crazy whose psychosis could just as well have rent innocent lives apart in Melbourne, San Francisco or Madrid but for where he happened to be born?

Not if you believe the collective outpouring of self-analysis that has been going on in Japan ever since. This was a peculiarly Japanese story, in a society that does not give anyone a second chance.

Japan is undoubtedly a very rich country. But it is a rich country without the ostentatious displays of wealth that remain in America, for example, and income inequality as it is conventionally measured has always been by international standards been very low. Merit and effort appeared, for years of growing Japanese prosperity, to define life’s chances.

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Author: Kent Anderson

A report submitted to Japanese Prime Minister Fukuda this week from 80 members of his Liberal Democratic Party proposing a drastic increase in the number of immigrants allowed into Japan. The report recommends immigration to a level of 10 per cent of the population. As the population is now roughly 128 million people, this would be roughly 13 million people or about 11 million more foreigners than there are in Japan today (yes, a population around half that of Australia’s moving to Japan)

The first issue I ask about (see ABC Radio) is Japan’s homogeneity, multiculturalism, and xenophobia. As Tessa Morris-Suzuki has most convincingly taught us, Japan is not purely homogeneous. Yet, by any standards it is probably the most homogeneous country in the world by ethnicity, religion, social-economic class, media and educational socialisation, history (and had a long period as a closed-country — the sakoku period). The introduction of a large number of people not within that mainstream will without a doubt result in friction. I assert this without commenting normatively on whether that is a good thing or bad thing. The virtue or otherwise of homogeneity is a matter for another day.

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