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excerpted
from Miracle to Malaise: What’s Next
for Japan? W. Michael Cox and Jahyeong Koo, Economic
Letter, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, V 1, No. 1
January 2006 [cited in http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/01/the_economic_an.html]
Restrictive labor practices often reflect a
society’s
fear of the disruptions caused by job losses. Do Japan’s
fears go even deeper? An unusual link between male suicide
rates and unemployment suggests that Japan exhibits a cultural
psychology
that makes job losses a particularly heavy burden.
From 1953 to 2003, each 1 percentage point increase in the cyclical
component of the male unemployment rate led to a 5.39 percentage
point increase in the cyclical component of the male suicide
rate. This effect is 38 times larger for Japan than for the United
States. The link holds for women in Japan, although it is much
weaker, at 1.38 percentage point. There is no significant relationship
between female suicide and unemployment rates in the United States.
The strong link between unemployment and suicide
probably reflects two aspects of Japanese society. First, the
Japanese are more
likely to interpret losing a job as a personal failure, rather
than the normal working of the economic system. Second, they
may be more pessimistic about finding new employment in an economy
that doesn’t feature robust job creation. Economic Letter—Insights
from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
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