Determining Factors of Volunteer Work Participation in Japan

Abstract

With the growing awareness of the sustainability concept, society’s interest towards the consideration for the wider community and the environment has developed. Local Agenda 21 has supported the voluntary process of local community consultation with the aim to create local policies and programs that work towards achieving sustainable development. This has stimulated the need for community participation through local volunteer participants. This paper will apply prefecture level panel data for Japan to examine the determining factors of volunteer work participation. The main results show that prefectures with higher children and senior citizen population and prefectures with higher usage of the internet and media are more active in the overall participation of volunteer work. On the other hand, prefectures with stronger urbanization are less likely to participate in volunteer work.

Keywords

• Volunteer work
• linear regression panel model
• senior citizen
• urbanization
• Japan