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Solitary non-employed persons (SNEPs) is a new concept that refers to ‘non-employed persons who are aged over 20 and 59 or less, who are not married or engaged in study, who are normally completely alone or who do not spend time with people other than family.’ The number of SNEPs rapidly increased in the decade from 2000, reaching 1,620,000 as of 2011 in Japan. However, the tendency for people in their 20’s not to become SNEPs has weakened, and the isolation of young unmarried non-employed persons is becoming more serious. The increase in SNEPs may be a factor of social instability and fiscal burden, such as the further increase in welfare recipients, and urgent policy responses are required such as public programs for generating skilled supporters who can outreach to SNEPs.

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This paper discusses employment policy measures that should be taken in an emergency, focussing on the measures actually taken in response to the great East Japan earthquake. When many workers were laid off immediately after the earthquake, employment adjustment subsidies were used to help employers maintain employment. However, the funds for such subsidies were soon nearly depleted. At the same time, people who were laid off or who lost their jobs but were ineligible for the subsidies were covered by extending unemployment benefits. The new job seeker support system was set up to provide training for people ineligible by employment insurance, while granting subsidies to training organisations, However, this new system, in its current state, leaves a large amount of room for improvement. Meanwhile, fund projects, which are flexible and convenient to use, worked well to some extent in preventing unemployment in the wake of successive crises such as Lehman crisis and the great East Japan earthquake. When formulating employment policy, it is necessary to consider whether support should be provided intensively to individual enterprises with high job creation potential, or whether it should instead be provided to groups of enterprises. Designing a resilient employment system which can withstand a crisis is a challenge for the future.

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This paper analyses aggregate labour dynamics during the global financial crisis in Japan and the role of non-standard work using micro data. The analysis proceeds in two steps. First, using comprehensive establishment-level datasets for the period 1991-2009, it provides a detailed portrait of the adjustment behaviour of establishments at the micro level. Second, it compares aggregate labour market dynamics during the global financial crisis with that observed during the 1997 crisis and decomposes the observed differences into components that can be attributed to changes in the micro-adjustment behaviour of Japanese establishments, changes in the incidence of non-standard work and changes in the distribution of shocks across establishments.

It finds that the incidence of non-standard work has increased considerably, worker turnover is much higher among non-standard than standard workers and adjustments in working-time are less important for non-standard workers. Counterfactual simulations suggest that the employment response during the global crisis would have been smaller if the incidence of non-standard work remained at the level observed during the 1997 crisis. The relatively small employment response observed during the global financial crisis is therefore driven by factors others than the increase in the incidence of non-standard work.

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We examine effects of entering the labor market during a recession on subsequent employment and earnings for Japanese and American men, using comparable household labor force surveys. We find persistent negative effects of the unemployment rate at graduation for less-educated Japanese men, in contrast to temporary effects for less-educated American men. The school-based hiring system and the dismissal regulation prolong the initial loss of employment opportunities for less-educated Japanese men. The effect on earnings for more-educated groups is also stronger in Japan, although the difference between the two countries is smaller than for less-educated groups.

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