Social Science Japan Journal Advance Access originally published online on May 19, 2007
Social Science Japan Journal 2007 10(1):23-40; doi:10.1093/ssjj/jym029
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Social Science Japan Journal 10:23-40 (2007)
© 2007 Oxford University Press
Jobless Youths and the NEET Problem in Japan
ji*
GENDA Yji is Professor of Labour Economics at the Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo. He has authored several books on jobless youth, including Hataraku Kaj
(NTT Shuppan, 2005), NEET (Gentsha, 2004) with Maganuma Mie and Shigoto no Naka no Aimai-na Fuan (Ch Kron Shinsha, 2001). The latter has been translated into English as A Nagging Sense of Job Insecurity: The New Reality Facing Japanese Youth (International House of Japan, 2005). He can be contacted at the Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan, or by e-mail at genda{at}iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp
This paper empirically examines the determinants of non-employed young Japanese people, whose number increased from the 1990s to the beginning of the 2000s. Non-working unmarried persons aged 15–34, who do not attend school, are classified into three types: ‘job seekers’ (type 1), who search for jobs; ‘non-job seekers’ (type 2), who express a desire to work but do not search for jobs, and ‘non-job seekers’ (type 3), who express no desire to work. Those in type 2 and type 3, non-job seekers, are defined to be ‘NEET’ or ‘not in employment, education or training’. Multinomial logistic regression results show that young persons whose expected returns from working are low—such as females, older people, the less educated and the long-term jobless—tend to refrain from working and become non-job seekers. Moreover, there is evidence of an income effect that makes youths from wealthy families more likely to be type 3 non-job seekers. However, the number of jobless youths from lower-income households has been increasing and hence, the income effect on type 3 jobless has become less relevant recently. As a result, young, less-educated males from poor families in Japan have become more likely to lose interest in work rather than those in middle-income families.
* I have benefited from useful comments and suggestions by four anonymous referees. I would also like to thank Ishida Hiroshi, Kondo Ayako, Brian Miller, Oi Masako, Shirahase Sawako and seminar participants at Cornell University. For this research, we used micro-level data from the Employment Status Surveys for 1992, 1997 and 2002, which were provided by the Research Centre for Information and Statistics of Social Science at the Institute of Economic Research at Hitotsubashi University. The data provided herein are strictly confidential.