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The Is A Japanese Word For Higher Gross Domestic Product Essay

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Countries have always competed economically. The government pushes for higher Gross Domestic Product, hoping that they will become the richest country. During economic crises, countries want to recover and have stability. All of this means that employees must work longer and harder. However, there are more consequences than countries realize. The more employees work, the more stressed they become, lowering their well-being. Large epidemics begin spreading throughout nations. As countries demand higher GDP, their people begin to suffering causing numerous deaths from overworking or suicide due to stress. Karoshi is a Japanese word for the epidemic spreading throughout the world, where people are worked to death. Instead of focusing on the population’s well-being, countries are only concerned with the economy, pushing employees to work long and stressful hours. The term, karoshi, first appeared in the early 1980s, when Japan enter into their bubble economy. Karoshi is defined as the, “‘condition of being permanently unable to work or dead due to acutely ischemic heart disease such as myocardial infraction, or acute heart failure caused by cerebral vascular diseases such as cerebral hemorrhage, subarachnoid hemorrhage and cerebral infraction, because inherent health problems such as hypertension and arteriosclerosis are deteriorated by excessive work overload’” (Kanai). For a while, the Ministry of Health Labor and Welfare in Japan did not focus on the issue because they

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