JAPAN’S WOMEN

WOMEN: JAPAN’S SECRET ECONOMIC WEAPON

Japan RealTime, October 7, 2010

The outlook for Japan’s economy has gone from bleak to bleaker. With the country still mired in deflation, the Bank of Japan on Wednesday downgraded its assessment of the economy. With not much left in their respective policy arsenals, what more can both the central bank and the government do to lift Japan out of its funk?

Turns out there’s a simple way to boost Japan’s gross domestic product growth by as much as 15%: getting more women into the work force, according to a recent Goldman Sachs report entitled “Womenomics 3.0: The Time is Now.”

The argument goes like this: While Japan’s overall female employment rate is now at a record 60%, there’s still a significant lag behind the men’s participation rate of 80%. If the female employment rate was also 80%, this would add another 8.2 million employees to the work force and boost Japan’s GDP by as much as 15%.

“Japan has but no choice but to tap its most underutilized resource,” says the report. “It’s hard to run a marathon with just one leg.”

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