Japan may have underpaid billions of yen in unemployment benefits after it emerged that the government has been incorrectly collecting labour market data for as long as 15 years. Officials are supposed to gather data from all firms with 500 or more employees but in Tokyo, only about one third of 1,400 such firms were surveyed, according to a civil servant at the labour ministry.

Labour minister Takumi Nemoto has ordered a thorough investigation but admitted he received a report about the problem as early as December 20. This means the ministry published data they knew had sampling problems, undermining confidence in data from the world's third-biggest economy.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2019