Among the Arab population, the level of poverty was higher than 55 percent last year, and among the ultra-orthodox it was 63 percent. The reasons for this are, for the Arab population, connected to education, discrimination in the labor market and the low level of participation of women in the labor force.
Other Asian countries have more abundant supplies of labor than Japan, while Japan has a comparative advantage in terms of capital stock and technology. Economic theory suggests that the Japanese manufacturing sector will focus less on labor-intensive manufacturing industries whose products can be substituted with imports from other Asian countries and tend to specialize in capitalor technology-intensive industries.