It depends on what you want to improve. If you consider that Japan has maximised productivity at the expense of quality of life, there may be a case for improving working conditions and living conditions for the same economic situation. Life quality and happiness are important policy goals, just like GDP. In Germany or Switzerland people work until 5pm and the countries run beautifully. Same in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland. The individual is crushed in Japan, but for what? Could it be that the country works as well when people just have a normal life outside work?
COMMENTS
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/b26f3f52-2c35-11e4-8eda-00144feabdc0.html#slide0
EDDG
@Dour Scot
This change in paradigm is the most urgent policy in Japan. Perhaps you say there is no “economic” policy available. The Asahi newspaper wrote this week: asking for work-hour reduction and gender equality for improvement of the economy is just wrong. These are necessary policies in themselves. If they help the economy – even better.
But then the quiz question is – who is interested in maintaining this semi-slave system in place? As always, just follow the money – who benefits the most by having people at work until 11pm every day? It may not be the usual suspects. And it does not have only to do with economics. The Japanese system is a social domination system requiring order from everyone at every time. Full obedience is mandatory. Relaxing this standard would be a concession to freedom – an admission that individual lives are more important than devotion to the company to which one BELONGS. That shift of paradigm, which benefits individuals but reduces the power of those who own them, is a taboo in Japan. And as you know, power is the most difficult thing to part with.
My two-cent, slightly subversive view on the topic. The more urgent economic policies are not strictly economic policies.