Does a Bad Start Lead to a Bad Finish in Japan?

There has been a growing concern about “Bad Start, Bad Finish (BS/BF)” issues in European countries for the last decade. Many young persons make a bad start to their working career and remain as atypical workers for long periods, being anticipated to reach retirement age with inadequate social security pension benefits. What about the case of Japan? In this paper, we discuss whether the BS/BF problem is as serious in Japan. The data set used is the 2011 Longitudinal Survey on Employment and Fertility (LOSEF): An Internet Version. The survey represents a sample of 3893 individuals aged 30-49 (born between November 1961 and October 1981). It contains long-term retrospective panel data of around 160,000 observations transcribed from the special Social Security Statements (the Japanese version of “Orange Letter”) issued by the Social Insurance Agency in fiscal 2009. Our provisional findings in this paper confirm that the BS/BF issue is currently as serious in Japan as in European countries. For young workers of the current generation, the proportions of BS have been increasing up to around 40% (females) and 32% (males) respectively, and the BF risk for current young BS persons will be around 90% (females) and a little more than 50% (males) respectively. Their incidence of poverty after retirement is likely to become quite problematic.

Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University

2012-03

English(eng)

technical report

VoR

33

CIS Discussion paper series

https://hdl.handle.net/10086/22880