The Political Economy of Japan's Low Fertility [Hardcover]

This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to one of Japan's thorniest public policy issues: why are women increasingly forgoing motherhood? At the heart of the matter lies a paradox: although the overall trend among rich countries is for fertility to decrease as female labor participation increases, gender-friendly countries resist the trend. Conversely, gender-unfriendly countries have lower fertility rates than they would have if they changed their labor markets to encourage the hiring of womenand therein lies Japan's problem. The authors argue that the combination of an inhospitable labor market for women and insufficient support for childcare pushes women toward working harder to promote their careers, to the detriment of childbearing. Controversial and enlightening, this book provides policy recommendations for solving not just Japan's fertility issue but those of other modern democracies facing a similar crisis.

Frances McCall Rosenbluth is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Leitner Program in Political Economy at Yale University. Her recent publications includeThe Politics of Oligarchy: Institutional Choice in Prewar Japan(1995); andJapan's Political Marketplace(1993).This book argues that Japan's extremely low fertility rate is due to labor markets inhospitable to women , which make it difficult for them to balance home and work and discourage them from having as many children as they want. The Political Economy of Japan's Low Fertilityis that most desirable sort of edited volume: a compact, tightly focused, and accessible collection of investigations into a problem that is compelling across a range of subject areas... [It] does a clean and thoughtful job of applying political economy models to explaining why it makes sense for Japanese women to opt out of childbearing. The book's heavy emphasis on rational-actor explanations and the persistent use of comparative cases from Europe and the United States enclS°