Gender, Growth and Trade: The Miracle Economies of the Postwar Years. By David Kucera. London: Routledge, 2001. Pp. xi, 217.

Extract

The central theme of this book is the interplay of women's employment and the macro-economy in postwar Germany and Japan. David Kucera introduces the distinction between two possible types of flexibility in the labor market. The first occurs in the absence of interference with the market mechanism from laws or institutions. This flexibility may reduce unemployment and increase the response time to shocks, at the cost of low wages and insufficient training. In the second type of flexibility, a buffer group provides this flexibility, while core workers are protected from the vagaries of the market and receive training and high wages. Kucera argues that by using women as a buffer group to protect men, Japan is able at a macro-level to reap the benefits of both the “low-road” and “high-road” approaches. Bolstering this argument, and showing that Germany pursues instead the simpler “high-road” strategy, is the most important aim of the book.