The unprecedented rapid aging of Japanese society has posed two serious problems: a projected shortage of labour and a projected solvency crisis of the public pension fund. To cope with these, the Japanese government has decided to raise the public pension age from 60 to 65 from the start of the twenty-first century. In addition, it is pursuing a policy to secure employment for people aged 60 to 64. This chapter gives an account of how the government is pursuing this employment policy and discusses the initiative from several angles.
Canada and other industrial nations have undergone two decades of labour-market turbulence that has profoundly affected employment opportunities for young people. The spread of contingent work forms, high structural unemployment, declining real incomes, and the growing gap between ′good′ and ′bad′ jobs have contributed to make the school-to-work transition more difficult and complex than ever. Many youth have reacted to an increasingly competitive and volatile work world by investing in further education. While this seems consistent with the human-resource-development approach to economic prosperity advocated by government and industry (Crouch, 1997), the problem of lagging productivity often gets attributed to the...
Traditional life-course models conceptualize a linear development from birth to death through education, work, and retirement, or prework, work, and post-work stages (Kohli, 1985; Kohli et al., 1991). While it was the achievement of Kohli (1986) to reintroduce the concept of the life course into social sciences dominated by structuralist and institutional approaches, his concept of work refers to waged or salaried employment without reference to unpaid work in reproduction. A so-called normal biography emerges which, however, excludes large segments of any population from consideration. First, life-course models based on remunerative productive or administrative work are male oriented and thus...
The unification of Germany in 1990 meant that the former German Democratic Republic, with the approval of the majority of its 16 million citizens, gave up its sovereignty and was merged into the Federal Republic of Germany. Unified Germany now has 82 million inhabitants. Through the act of unification, the East Germans became a minority of about 20 per cent of the total population of Germany. This minority was obliged to adapt to a fundamental transformation of its accustomed political, legal, and economic system, whereas things remained more or less unchanged for the West German majority. Thus, both by the...