Japan labour shortages offer chance to developing countries
Wednesday, 26 August 2015
Besides Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and some other middle-eastern countries, Japan has emerged as a potential country for exporting unskilled and semi-skilled manpower from developing countries like Bangladesh, reports BSS.
According to recent statistics, for each job seeker in Japan applying to work as a waiter, there are more than three available positions. Home helpers and long-term caregivers are equally in demand.
"If you want to work as a security guard, you can choose from around five openings, and for some positions in the construction business the job-to-applicant ratio is over six", said a posting in the IMF Blog site IMF direct.
Two economists of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Giovanni Ganelli and Naoko Miake, in their posting wrote that Japan's labour shortages are the result of both a shrinking population, which limits the overall pool of workers and skill mismatches.
The reduced supply of labour is one of the factors bringing down medium-term potential growth, which the IMF estimates at just 0.6 per cent. Japan's shortages are also large from an international perspective. The ratio of job vacancies as a percentage of the labour force population - an indicator of labour shortages - stood at 3.2 per cent in 2013 in Japan. The same figure is 1.1 in Germany and 2.5 in the United States.
Increasing the supply of foreign labour, however, has received less attention in the policy debate, the economists said adding that low historical immigration rates are reflected in the fact that Japan's reliance on foreign labour is only 0.3 per cent - the lowest among advanced countries.
The current growth strategy-the so-called "third arrow" of Abenomics-includes some measures to increase foreign labour supply. These include relaxing immigration requirements for highly skilled foreign workers, plans to allow foreign domestic helpers to work in Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and plans to allow businesses to bring foreign employees to Japan for short-term training.