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Demography
Published in: Demography 6/2017

02-10-2017

Unemployment, Nonstandard Employment, and Fertility: Insights From Japan’s “Lost 20 Years”

Authors: James M. Raymo, Akihisa Shibata

Published in: Demography | Issue 6/2017

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Abstract

In this study, we examine relationships of unemployment and nonstandard employment with fertility. We focus on Japan, a country characterized by a prolonged economic downturn, significant increases in both unemployment and nonstandard employment, a strong link between marriage and childbearing, and pronounced gender differences in economic roles and opportunities. Analyses of retrospective employment, marriage, and fertility data for the period 1990–2006 indicate that changing employment circumstances for men are associated with lower levels of marriage, while changes in women’s employment are associated with higher levels of marital fertility. The latter association outweighs the former, and results of counterfactual standardization analyses indicate that Japan’s total fertility rate would have been 10 % to 20 % lower than the observed rate after 1995 if aggregate- and individual-level employment conditions had remained unchanged from the 1980s. We discuss the implications of these results in light of ongoing policy efforts to promote family formation and research on temporal and regional variation in men’s and women’s roles within the family.
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Footnotes
1
The proportion of births registered to unmarried mothers is currently .02, up from .01 in the 1990s (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research 2015).
 
3
We limited our focus to ages 20–40, given the very small numbers of births occurring outside of that age range. Vital statistics data show that for the period in question (1990–2006), 98 % of childbearing occurred between the ages of 20 and 40.
 
4
Because the 2004 survey asked only about age at which respondents entered their current marriage and not about previous marriages for the formerly married, we imputed age at marriage and age at divorce for these women using data on modal durations between first marriage and first childbirth and between youngest child’s birth and divorce observed in the National Fertility Surveys conducted by the National Institute for Population and Social Security Research. We used his imputation procedure for a small number of observations (n = 116, or 7 % of the women in the analyses of marital status).
 
5
The employment history calendar asked respondents to identify their employment status(es) at each age, with response options being in school, looking for work (unemployed), nonstandard employment, regular employment, self-employment, piecework, and family work. If none of these statuses were marked, the respondent was coded as “not in the labor force” at that age.
 
6
For simplicity, measures of employment status following school completion include only time spent unemployed and in nonstandard employment.
 
7
Values of early-career measures were changed only for those who completed school in 1986 or later and were thus within five years of graduation for at least one year during the period 1990–2006. In the analyses of marital status, 57 % of women graduated from school in 1986 or later; and in the analyses of marital fertility, 41 % of women and 32 % of their husbands completed schooling in 1986 or later.
 
8
The values for 1980–1989 are summed across all observations (1990–2006).
 
9
Results for the contrast between being formerly married and never married are presented in panel B of Table 3. Because these results are not central to the subsequent standardization exercise, we do not discuss them here.
 
10
The estimated values of TFR (1.59 in 1990–1994, 1.51 in 1995–1999, and 1.38 in 2000–2006) are somewhat (9 % to 12 %) higher than the TFR based on registration data. This primarily reflects somewhat higher estimated age-specific marital fertility rates at ages 20–25 in the KHPS data (relative to vital statistics data).
 
11
Aggregate employment measures are not education-specific (or parity-specific).
 
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Metadata
Title
Unemployment, Nonstandard Employment, and Fertility: Insights From Japan’s “Lost 20 Years”
Authors
James M. Raymo
Akihisa Shibata
Publication date
02-10-2017
Publisher
Springer US
Published in
Demography / Issue 6/2017
Print ISSN: 0070-3370
Electronic ISSN: 1533-7790
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-017-0614-y

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