On December 8, 2016 our Project Professor Naohiro Ogawa made a presentation on the impact of recent Japanese government's policies concerning childcare and trends regarding childcare leave in Japanese companies on the country's fertility at the international conference entitled "Low Fertility, Labor Market and Family: Factors, Outcomes, and Policy Implications", organized by the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs (KIHASA) and the East-West Centar in Honolulu, Hawaii.
The presentation "The Impact of Extended Eligibility for Childcare Leave upon Fertility in Japan" first traced the postwar changes in Japanese fertility and government policies regarding childcare leave, and then reported estimates of earnings profiles of Japanese female workers made by Prof. Ogawa, Ass. Prof. Matsukura and Prof. Sang-Hyop Lee by applying data obtained from the 2007 and 2010 rounds of the National Survey on Work and Family to a conventional wage equation, with the procedure for addressing the selection bias incorporated. The presentation then analyzed the impact of the use of childcare leave upon fertility (parity progression from no children to first child and from first child to second) in Japan, using the computed women’s full-time and part-time hourly wages as one of the key predictors.
The three authors found that since 2005, Japan’s childcare leave scheme has been increasingly utilized by married female full-time workers, particularly those employed by large companies, and that the benefits which female full-time workers have received from the government's childcare leave scheme and related programs reinforced by the expansion of childcare leave schemes within large-scale businesses have been quite substantial in the sense that they have significantly reduced the opportunity cost of having children in Japan. According to the authors, this result appears to support the view that Japan’s childcare leave system, particularly in large firms, has been playing a significant role in restoring the country’s fertility, which has been on a rise since 2005. However, their calculations also suggest that the positive impact of childcare leave upon the parity progression ratios has been negligible among part-time married female workers, despite the fact that they have been entitled to utilize it since 2005.