Japan: investors ignore good news

The good news just keeps coming in Japan. Employees’ earnings grew by 0.9% year-on-year in August, slightly down from 1.6% in July.

The good news just keeps coming in Japan. Employees' earnings grew by 0.9% year-on-year in August, slightly down from 1.6% in July. The fact growth has decreased "is not a disaster", says Freya Beamish of Pantheon Macroeconomics. "It's already quite something that Japanese wage growth was ever high enough to fall to 0.9%." And besides, the details of the data imply that the labour market is getting even tighter.

Under prime minister Shinzo Abe employment growth "has exceeded any reasonable expectations", notes Jonathan Allum on The Blah. The number of Japanese people of working age has declined by 4.5 million over the past five years, but there are 2.5 million more in employment, partly because more women have entered the workforce. This is "remarkable".

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Marina Gerner is an award-winning journalist and columnist who has written for the Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist, The Guardian and Standpoint magazine in the UK; the New York Observer in the US; and die Bild and Frankfurter Rundschau in Germany.

Marina is also an adjunct professor at the NYU Stern School of Business at their London campus, and has a PhD from the London School of Economics.

Her first book, The Vagina Business, deals with the potential of “femtech” to transform women’s lives, and will be published by Icon Books in September 2024.

Marina is trilingual and lives in London.