Truly 'useful' Analysis in Economics -A Survey of Labor-Economics Papers Printed on This Journal during the Years 1980-2008-

O15

N35

Thirty nine empirical studies, appeared on this journal, volumes 31-59, relating to labor economics ((1) population, (2) employment, (3) wages, (4) income distribution, and (5) industrial relations) have been selected as exemplary contributions for broadening one's knowledge about the labor market, with the following major findings. (1) The Meiji era, the initial phase of Japan's industrialization, did not register a clear decline in the death rate, postponing the population transition to 1920-30. Changing social consciousness in the country towards the late twentieth century, on the other hand, has contributed to a decline in the birth rate. (2) The Japanese labor market in the 1990s still retained its notable characteristic of employment tenure, i.e. long-term employment relationships. (3) Wages, while conditioned by marginal labor productivity, also affect one's own work efficiency via the comparison (higher or lower) relative to fellow workers' earnings. (4) Trends toward inequality in Japanese income distribution in the early twentieth century, while halted and reversed during the 1960s-1980s, has reappeared since the closing of the high growth period. (5) Whereas the Japanese labor movement weakened after the early 1970s, the vital importance in corporate management of stable, co-operative industrial relations has remained unchanged throughout the period under observation. The paper ends by advocating for future references and follow-up studies the establishment of academic archives that store the statistical databases, which have been made use of by the authors of empirical investigations such as those surveyed by the present paper.