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Politics

Subsidized child care slightly raises women's employment in Japan

System needs improvement to increase mothers participating in labor force

| Japan

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe began a campaign called "womenomics" in 2013 in a bid to empower women and boost the economy by increasing female participation in the labor force. Womenomics has been an integral part of Abe's policy package, dubbed Abenomics, and one of its three main goals is to push up the birthrate to 1.8 by providing 500,000 additional child care slots from 2016 to 2018.

Policymakers and experts believe a lack of subsidized child care is the main obstacle to getting more women into the labor market. The female labor force participation rate for those aged 15-64 was 66% in 2016, which is slightly higher than that in the U.S. However, the figure for women with children aged 0-2 was only 37% in 2010. This is much lower than the average among the countries in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which is 54%. 

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