Quality of Child Care in Japan: Evidence from Micro-level Data (in Japanese)

This study is a comprehensive empirical assessment on the quality of child care in Japan. Especially we focus on the comparison of quality of services between public and private centers to investigate higher wage costs in public centers could be justified by higher quality of care. Since no single index is entitled to stand for the quality of child care, we adopt three different approaches to measure quality. We take advantage of some unique survey data, which contains the largest sample size and the highest quality currently available in Japan. The "test score" approach uses several indexes to evaluate the quality and to compare the total scores by different management. We observe that public centers have higher scores in the structural index to stand for labor or capital inputs. However, this is not the case for developmental psychological index, parents' convenience index and other index. The "quality of workers" approach adjusts for the non-random allocation of workers to measure the quality of child care closely related with the quality of employees. The results based on the treatment effect model demonstrate that the share of regular or qualified workers and the number of children per worker is better in private-licensed centers than it is in public centers, and thus provide higher quality of services than do the public centers. In other words, the superiority measured by the structural index in public centers disappears after controlling selection bias. The "users' request" approach utilizes the survey on child care users for evaluating the services currently being offered and demanded in future. Private-licensed centers provide higher quality regarding parents' convenience and additional care such as extra hours of care and holiday care. Thus, the findings are consistent with the "quality of workers" approach in that the quality is better in private-licensed centers. These results demonstrate that private licensed centers are more likely to provide higher quality of services than public centers and higher wage rates in public facilities cannot be justified.