Monday, August 5, 2013

Labor Force Update

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Participation is higher across the board, though the "M" for women persists. The exception is the 20-24 age bracket, where lower participation reflects women attending 4-year colleges (75% of young women attend some sort of post-high-school education, including junior colleges and technical schools). Image

The data show the rise of post-secondary schooling for men, but also a drop in participation of 25-29 year olds since the banking crisis, by 2+ percentage points. Older brackets dropped about 1.5 pct pts. Image Data for women in older age brackets. Except for the age 70+ bracket, all have risen, but only over the last 6-7 years for women around retirement age. Image Over the last 50 years we see the advent of retirement as the norm for men age 65-69, but with some reversal the last 6-7 years, similar to the shift in participation by older women. Image

This is my favorite graph, highlighting the monotonic rise in labor force participation by younger women, first by women in the 25-29 age bracket, then (starting about 15 years ago) in parallel by women in the 30-34 age bracket. Now that seems to have spread to women in the 35-39 bracket -- another year or two's data will help clarify...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello;
Thanks for the informative figures.
What is the source for these data? Are they from OECD data or from the Japan Statistics Bureau?
Thanks
Jill

Mike Smitka said...

No, I don't go to the OECD for data unless I'm doing some sort of quick-and-dirty cross-national comparison.

I don't recall whether I started with Stats Japan or went to JILPT (http://www.jil.go.jp/english/). My recollection is that these detailed data are published once a year in the annual summary of the Monthly Labor Survey, thus the January (or Feb?) issue.

Anonymous said...

Thank you!