Fertility and female labor-force participation in Japan: Is the new home-economics approach applicable?

After continuous fertility decline over a few decades, the total fertility rate for Japan is recently below 1.4. In order to analyze the causes, economists have typically applied the new home-economics approach, which relates fertility to female labor-force participation and the opportunity costs of wives' time. In this paper, however, the applicability to the fertility in Japan is investigated and the negative results are obtained from different two aspects. First, for the period 1968-2000, the time-series analyses by the Butz-Ward type models are attempted. The applicability to the total fertility rate for Japan is denied for both of the two specifications, which were used in the former studies. Secondly, the relationship between fertility and the labor-force participation of wives, which is assumed to be negative within the new home-economics framework, is investigated by cross-sectional analyses. The data aggregated for the 47 prefectures of Japan are used. The number of women's own children, data taken from the 1995 Population Census of Japan, is utilized to measure fertility. The proportion of the employed is analyzed for ever-married women, while the proportion of the regular staff is analyzed for employed ever-married women. The prefectural data imply that the relationship between fertility and the labor-force participation of wives is rather positive.