Secular trends in the Japanese labour market during the lost decades: A reply to Andrew Gordon

In a recent contribution (2017) Professor Gordon takes a very critical stance on our earlier article titled “Decades not lost, but won” (Blind and Lottanti von Mandach 2015), which he sees as ‘revisionist’ and as applying ‘too low a standard’. Professor Gordon provides a selection of granular data that might be understood as refuting two of our earlier findings, and attempts replication of the analysis underlying our third finding, but finds diverging evidence. While his labelling of our research is unpleasant, the implicit and explicit questioning of our results is troubling. This reply demonstrates that the evidence in Professor Gordon’s article does not challenge our earlier findings on aggregate developments during the ‘lost decades’ and provides explanation for the diverging results in Professor Gordon’s replication effort. We argue that the results of his replication only apply to the fraction of non-regular employees working full time, while ours applies to the large majority of part-time employees.