{"id":14245,"date":"2012-10-13T02:10:23","date_gmt":"2012-10-13T02:10:23","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2025-10-15T13:36:56","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T13:36:56","slug":"women-could-save-japan-s-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/?p=14245","title":{"rendered":"Women could save Japan’s economy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Women could rescue Japan’s chronically underperforming economy if more of them went to work, the female director of the International Monetary Fund said.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Christine Lagarde said Japan’s shrinking and greying workforce, which has left the country struggling to pay welfare bills<\/strong>, could really benefit from an injection of female talent.
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\n“Because there is this ageing problem… we believe that women could actually help very much,” Lagarde told reporters in Tokyo, where the IMF is holding its annual meetings.<\/p>\n

“It’s critically important the world over but it’s particularly important in Japan,”<\/strong> she said, referring to IMF research on the role of women in the country “that indicates that women could actually save Japan”.<\/p>\n

“Today you have five out of 10 Japanese women out of the job market, as opposed to two out of 10 men,” she said.<\/p>\n

Lagarde said if there were “better kindergartens and better assistance and cultural acceptance that women can actually do the job, it would be excellent for the Japanese economy”, <\/strong>she said.<\/p>\n

Despite high levels of education, many women drop out of the workforce when they have children, and social pressures to play the homemaker remain.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Japan’s once world-beating economy has spent more than two decades treading water <\/strong>with entrenched deflation and anaemic growth.<\/p>\n

Lagarde, a former finance minister of her native France, was speaking after Bank of Japan governor Masaaki Shirakawa stressed the importance of raising the labor participation rate of elderly people and women.<\/strong><\/p>\n

“If we could succeed in raising the participation rate, then the growth of labor force will be reversed from a negative territory to a positive territory,” he told a seminar.<\/p>\n

Japan’s population is declining and ageing as young people increasingly put off starting families, seeing them as a crimp on their lifestyles and careers.<\/strong> The slow economy has also discouraged young people from having babies.<\/p>\n

Japan’s population last year shrank at the fastest rate since comparable records began<\/strong>, dropping by a record 0.2 percent, to an estimated 127,799,000 as of October 1 last year. It is expected to shrink dramatically over the next few decades.<\/p>\n

The proportion of people over the age of 65 stood at 23.3 percent, an all-time high and the highest percentage in the world<\/strong>, according to a government survey.<\/p>\n

Who run the world? Girls!<\/strong>
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