Japan’s Economic Partnership Agreement Healthcare Worker Programs as a Tool for “Soft Diplomacy”
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Japan is facing rapid depopulation and population ageing. With a shrinking domestic workforce and a growing share of elderly population in the country, Japan is expecting a huge shortage of manpower, especially in the expanding care sector. Prior to 2008, the Japanese healthcare labor market has been closed to immigrant workers. However, beginning in 2008, Japan started to accept Southeast Asian nurses and care workers under Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA) with three countries: Vietnam, Philippines, and Indonesia. Logically, one may suppose that this is a gesture of Japan opening its care market to foreign professionals. The scale of the acceptance of Southeast Asian nurses and care workers under EPA -- only a few hundred people per year -- is too small to have any measurable impact on the labor shortage of care workers” The minuscule scale of the EPA program has not expanded over a decade, and the fact that most foreign healthcare workers return to their home countries after participating in the program means that the EPA program is clearly not intended as a solution to the labor shortage. Moreover, although the program was implemented as an “Economic Partnership Agreement,” and despite the Japanese government insisting that acceptance of foreign nurses and care workers under EPA is designed to promote international economic cooperation, the program per se does not deliver substantial economic gains to any party involved. The thesis therefore attempts to answer the question: “why does Japan continue to accept Southeast Asian nurses and care workers under EPA?” Inspired by the patterns of Japan’s soft power foreign diplomacy in the latter half of the 20th century, the thesis finds a potential explanation for the continuation of the program: soft diplomacy, i.e. activities that help foster positive feelings among foreign citizens towards the country (Japan).
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | December 3, 2021 |
| Date modified | December 5, 2022 |
| Publication date | December 6, 2021 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Wang, Xinyi | |
|---|---|---|
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Stanford Global Studies, Center for East Asian Studies | |
| Thesis advisor | Dasher, Richard |
Subjects
| Subject | EPA |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- Wang, X. (2021). Japan’s Economic Partnership Agreement Healthcare Worker Programs as a Tool for “Soft Diplomacy”. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/zk247jb3158
Collection
Stanford Center for East Asian Studies Thesis Collection
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- Contact
- xw356@stanford.edu
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