Effects of Globalization and of Regional and Business Adaptation upon Employment

Japan’s economy has now begun to a certain extent to rise out of the low point in the business cycle. But its unemployment rate at the beginning of 1999 has already surpassed that of the USA and is still rising. Japan was long famous for its low unemployment rate, and the “Japanese employment system” was often praised in connection with it. If one surveys Japanese unemployment in a longer temporal context, it is easy to see that the unemployment rate, given the modest fluctuations in the business cycle, stayed below 3% through the first half of the 1990s, but in the second half of the 1990s showed a rising trend of from 3% to 4% (see Table 1). Now it has reached its highest point since historically comparable figures for unemployment were first recorded in Japan, in 1953. It can be presumed that along with this rising unemployment rate, significant changes in the employment market or the employment structure will occur in Japan. Let us start with a look at the various aspects of this experience—for us, the first—with high unemployment.