戦間期日本の社会事業と農家女性労働供給
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概要
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In modern Japan, half of the total labor force belonged to the agricultural sector. Moreover, it contributed to industrial development since it was closely connected with the nonagricultural sector. Female workers accounted for half of the total workers in the agricultural sector and for 60 percent of the female workforce. It had been proposed that a woman allocated her time not only for housework but also for farming and sideline occupations in order to increase the efficiency of resource allocation of household economy. Recent investigation has demonstrated that a woman's farming hours continued to increase with agricultural integration, which is a feature of agrarian labor supply in modern Japan. Married women in farming households decreased their domestic labor hours and increased their farming hours in interwar Japan. However, nothing has been speculated regarding how women could reduce the number of hours spent on housekeeping and what were the means of reducing housework. This paper examines the impact of childcare centers on female labor supply of rural households in interwar Japan. I use the following two approaches to estimate the impact of childcare on female labor supply. First, by comparing the number of children receiving childcare in Kyoto obtained through national census, I find that almost every household with an infant in the area, where a nursery was established, left their children with the institution. Moreover, historical documents suggest that their demand originated from the incentives of securing steady labor supply in order to deal with household vulnerability to climaterelated risks, and of receiving good care in terms of sanitation and education at a low price. Second, using longitudinal data on agricultural households from Noka Keizai Chosabo (Agricultural Household Survey), I estimate the female labor supply function and test the basic unitary household model, considering external child rearing. These results indicate that women whose children receive childcare are more likely to solve the trade-off between nursing and working, and work outside. The key finding in this paper is that childcare significantly eases women's burden of nursing and assures them to pursue farming and sideline occupations. This result shows that the outsourced care in social work is an important evidence to explain the long-term increase of female labor supply and the efficient resource allocation of household economy by women. Another implication of the result corrects the common view in the history of social welfare, which assumes that childcare centers is not conformable in terms of nursing and life of farm.
- 2012-10-30