Japan's working poor left behind by Abenomics

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By Chang-Ran Kim TOKYO (Reuters) - Last Christmas Eve, Ririko Saito and her 11-year-old daughter gathered some plastic bottles, pots and a kettle and made several trips to a nearby park to get water. At 16 percent, Japan's relative poverty rate - the share of the population living on less than half of the national median income - is already the sixth-worst among the 34 OECD countries, just ahead of the United States. Child poverty in working, single-parent households like Saito's is by far the worst at over 50 percent, making Japan the only country where having a job does not reduce the poverty rate for that group. As Prime Minister Shinzo Abe charges ahead with his \"Abenomics\" policies to revive economic growth, things look set to get harder, not better, for Japan's down-and-out.




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