Future Forecasts of the Impact of AI on Employment in Japan and Policy Proposals

This paper describes the impact of AI on employment in Japan with the goal of providing future forecasts and policy proposals.

A number of estimates of the impacts of AI have been published internationally and they are roughly classified into three categories; "labor market structure," "total number of employees," and "decreasing number of employees." In this paper, forecasts of (1) labor market structure; including effects on women and routine cognitive jobs, (2) decreasing number of employees, and (3) total number of employees, are discussed and forecasting of (1)(2)(3) in Japan are tired, based on the previously published international estimates mentioned above.

As policy proposals related to future measures, the following are proposed from the perspective of post-measures against economic inequality: (1) redistribution of wealth and (2) human resource development and employment measures. Regarding the latter, emphasis is placed on i) training of human resources ready for the era of Fourth Industrial Revolution and ii) re-employment and smooth restructuring of lost labor.

Finally, this paper includes exchanges of views between the German experts of the theme "The Future of Work" on which provides additional insight on the topic.