The government is set to extend paid child care leave to a maximum of about two years from the current 18 months, and will submit a bill to revise the relevant legislation during next year's regular Diet session.

The length of the extension will be set at a meeting of the Labor Policy Council, an advisory panel to the minister of health, labor and welfare. The government hopes to ameliorate the lack of day care spaces across Japan by allowing parents to take more time off work to care for their children. The extension will be included in government economic measures that are to be put together this month.

Employees can generally take paid leave until their child turns one, and extend that by six months if no day care spaces are available. However, the problem of insufficient day care facilities has worsened, and there have been cases of parents being forced to quit their jobs to take care of their children.

Currently, child care leave pay is 67 percent of an employee's regular salary for the first half-year, and 50 percent from then until the year-and-a-half limit, paid from the employment insurance fund. Last fiscal year, around 300,000 people in Japan took child care leave, receiving a total of some 410 billion yen in such benefits.

Also as part of economic measures, the government is preparing to reduce employment insurance premiums to lessen the financial burden on workers and encourage consumer spending.

The employment insurance fund has grown to around 6.3 trillion yen due in part to keeping down unemployment benefit payments, and the government plans to make use of the money to reduce premiums. The government is considering temporarily suspending annual aid of around 150 billion yen to the fund from the national treasury next fiscal year and using the freed up money to improve the salaries of day care and nursing care workers.

The economic policies are also expected to include infrastructure projects, such as bringing forward a planned extension to Osaka of the maglev bullet train line and encouraging the construction of other planned Shinkansen lines.

Furthermore, to prevent financial market chaos caused by Britain's exit from the European Union from interfering with small and medium business finances, the government is considering extending a program to supply banks and other financial institutions with public funds beyond the current March 2017 end date.