Atsuhiro Yamada

Government as Institutional Entrepreneur: Extending Working Life in the UK and Japan.

Through the lens of Institutional Entrepreneurship, this paper discusses how governments use the levers of power afforded through business and welfare systems to affect change in the organisational management of older workers. It does so using national stakeholder interviews in two contrasting economies: the United Kingdom and Japan. Both governments have taken a ‘light-touch’ approach to work and retirement. However, the highly institutionalised Japanese system affords the government greater leverage than that of the liberal UK system in changing employer practices at the workplace level.

Comparing the Minimum Income Standard in the UK and Japan: Methodology and Outcome

Minimum Income Standard (MIS) research involves an innovative methodology that combines consensual decisions made through discussion by members of the public, supported by input from experts. MIS addresses questions about income adequacy, and in particular, what is the income that people need in order to reach a minimum socially acceptable standard of living. The first MIS for Britain was published in the UK in 2008, and in 2010 researchers from Japan and the UK began to collaborate on developing a comparable Minimum Income Standard for Japan. This article discusses the differences and similarities between the UK and Japanese MIS. It looks at the challenges of applying the methodology in a very different setting and compares the results of the research in the UK and in Japan. Although there are notable differences in the lists of goods and services that comprise the budgets, there are also some striking similarities. This research suggests that the MIS methodology offers an approach that can be used in different countries to inform discussions on contemporary living standards and societal norms, and to enable international comparisons to be drawn.

Japan: Determinants of Retirement in a Hyper-Aged Society

Today Japan is far ahead of the rest of the world on the aging curve of the population and faces unprecedented pressure to delay workers’ retirement. In this national context, workers’ retirement decisions and behaviors are largely determined, at the macro- and mesolevels, by the interplay between the government and employers over reforming mandatory retirement corporate policies thoroughly and uniformly institutionalized across the country’s workplaces, which are set at ages much younger than in most other developed countries around the world. The primary microlevel determinants of retirement include the persistent gender roles, which have still affected many female workers, those currently aged 50 and older in particular, as they are often rendered as primary caregiver for children, aged parents, and the household.