Project's contribution to society - Hyogo Prefecture

On 8 July 2017 the leading local daily in Hyogo Prefecture "Kobe Newspaper" carried an article about research conducted by our project members on untapped work potential of the elderly in that prefecture, entitled: "Potential Work Force Estimated to be 516,000".
The research carried out by our project co-investigator Assistant Professor Rikiya Matsukura in collaboration with Professor Shigeyuki Abe from Doshisha University was based on the data collected by the Japanese Study of Aging and Retirement (JSTAR) and, in terms of methodology, relied on the framework of the National Transfer Accounts (NTA).
Prof. Matsukura estimated the working potential of persons between 60 and 79 years of age, whose total number in Hyogo Prefecture is currently 1.42 million, based on the information on their health condition found in the JSTAR questionnaire. According to his calculations, around 516,000 of these unemployed elderly inhabitants of the prefecture are in sufficiently good health to work. The estimated number is almost equivalent to 20% of the entire workforce in the prefecture, so utilizing these healthy, retired elderly persons could help alleviate the labor shortage in the prefecture and elsewhere in Japan, which has primarily been brought about by low fertility and population aging. Prof. Matsukura's calculations also show that, if all of the healthy elderly of ages between 60 and 79 in the prefecture could be employed, the generated labor income would amount to around 7,6 billion dollars.
Prof. Abe, who presented the above-mentioned results of the joint research with Prof. Matsukura at a symposium organized by the Hyogo Earthquake Memorial 21st Century Research Institute on July 7, concluded in his talk that this potential work capacity must not remain untapped and that the mandatory retirement age in Japan should be raised to age 70.
The research by professors Matsukura and Abe is an extension of the joint work by Prof. Matsukura, Project Co-investigator Dr. Satoshi Shimizutani, Project Professor Naohiro Ogawa and others on the latent work potential of Japanese elderly published in English earlier this year in the Journal of the Economics of Ageing under the title: "Untapped Work Capacity among Old Persons and their Potential Contributions to the 'Silver Dividend' in Japan".

Kobe Newspaper article (in Japanese):

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