Japanese Manufacturing Sector Research Articles

The effect of import competition on labor income inequality through firm and worker heterogeneity in the Japanese manufacturing sector

This study estimates the effects of import competition from Asia on the labor income inequality of Japanese manufacturing workers, considering firm and worker heterogeneity. Parameters are obtained from regression results of annual salary by using constructed worker–establishment panel data. The estimated salary change is positively and negatively larger for higher- and lower-paid workers, respectively, implying that labor income inequality among industry–size–skill–gender groups has increased due to imports from Asia. However, the actual evolution of income inequality during 1998–2014 is not successfully explained by Asian imports: other shocks overshadow import competition to determine actual income inequality.

Offshoring and working hours adjustments in a within-firm labor market

Although a growing body of literature identifies the within-firm redistribution effects of trade, research on the adjustment processes in within-firm labor markets remains scarce. This study analyzes the within-firm adjustment of working hours and wages by considering workers’ educational background and gender in response to a change in offshoring. Matched worker–firm panel data in the Japanese manufacturing sector covering 1998 to 2014 are used. The analysis leads to the following three observations. First, offshoring does not significantly alter the skill premium and gender gap in terms of scheduled monthly salaries and scheduled hourly wages. Second, offshoring decreases skill premium in annual hourly wages, whereas it increases gender gap in annual salaries. Third, this uneven impact on annual variables arises from the different changes in overtime working hours: college graduates work longer with a lower overtime premium, whereas female workers do not increase overtime work.

Impulsores de las competencias de las filiales extranjeras: El caso de Japón

This paper addresses drivers behind whether foreign subsidiaries located in Japan possess single or multiple competences. We use an original database compiled by means of survey amongst foreign subsidiaries operating in the Japanese manufacturing sector. Results show that subsidiaries predominantly possess a sales & marketing competence, but some also have multiple competences in business functions and/or technological competences. Subsidiaries with greater autonomy, significant internal network relationships, and external business networks are more likely to demonstrate a wider range of key competences. The paper provides novel contributions, demonstrating that drivers show differences in explaining various competences, and exploring subsidiary competences in the unique Japanese host environment.

Macroeconomic, institutional, and sectoral determinants of outward foreign direct investment: Evidence from Japan

AbstractThis paper empirically explores the determinants of outward foreign direct investment (FDI) in the Japanese manufacturing sector. We estimate a gravity model of FDI for 30 host countries covering the period 2005–2017, using Poisson pseudo maximum likelihood to tackle the issue of zero‐value observations. The results indicate that Japanese overseas investments are not only driven by traditional factors, such as market size, the yen real exchange rate, trade openness, differences in perception of corruption, and financial instability, but also by industry characteristics. In particular, we find that low technological industries characterized by growing labour costs are more likely to be relocated abroad. Furthermore, we demonstrate nonlinearities in the determinants of Japanese overseas investments depending on the host country's development, the host country's region, and the category of FDI implemented (vertical vs horizontal).

The Effects of R&D Expenditure and Technological Spillover on Industry Revenues in Japan

This research analyzes the effects of research and development (R&D) activities on industries' sales based on accounting information for the Japanese manufacturing sector from 2001–2017, with the aim of accurately grasping the current situation. The analytical model is based on the traditional extended Cobb-Douglas production function. By avoiding the statistical problem of endogeneity and serial correlation, a multiple regression analysis was used to understand the statistical superiority of the effects of R&D expenditure and technological spillovers on sales figures. This study also analyzes the relationship between acceptance and supply of technological spillovers in Japanese industries to understand the current state of the impact of technological spillovers. In conclusion, the effects of recent R&D activities in the Japanese manufacturing sector are low. After the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis, Japan's economic growth has declined; this study could help improve R&D activities that support economic growth in this poor growth climate.

Lean and agile project management concepts in the project management profession

Lean and agile concepts have been the focus of researchers and practitioners since 1990. The lean concept started in the Japanese manufacturing sector to eliminate waste and enhance customer satisfaction. Whereas agile was introduced into the 20th-century manufacturing enterprise strategy report.The agile concept concentrates on quick response to variations in the market environment. The lean and agile concepts have emerged becoming managerial paradigms applicable to different industrial sectors and processes. However, the plethora of lean and agile implementations and settings makes the recent literature diverse and fragmented, and comprehensive analysis of the latest contributions on this space is deemed essential. Therefore, this research uses a systematic literature review of 160 related articles published in peer-reviewed academic journals between 2012 and 2018. The study applies descriptive and thematic analyses to the recent trends in this area and provides a framework that organises lean and agile researched issues into developed, intermediate and emerging based on their position in the researchlifecycle.

DETERMINANTS OF JAPAN MANUFACTURING EXPORT PERFORMANCE

Export has been believed as an ultimate engine for economic growth. There are many tools to boost export performance. Among of them are foreign networks, RD activities and firms’ size. A bigger opportunity of overseas market, innovative products and competitive prices are the expected outcome of applying those aforementioned settings within the segmented businesses. This paper aims to obtain empirical insight of the factors that may influence export performance. Employing Japanese manufacturing sector export performance, as one of the leading industries in the world, the study explore the linkage between those three preceding factors to export performance improvement in Japan. Study results shows that research and development activities as well as firm’s size play critical roles within the improvement of Japanese manufacturing export performance. Whereas foreign networks, which denoted by foreign subsidiaries, has an insignificant positive contribution to export performance. Future studies may give in-depth focus on the foreign networks issues within a longer period of study. The implication of this study is addressing these two essential issues, RD activities and firms’ size, to the policy making processes in achieving optimal results of manufacturing export performance

Productivity and technological progress of the Japanese manufacturing industries, 2000–2014: estimation with data envelopment analysis and log-linear learning model

How has the Japanese manufacturing sector fared in productivity and technological learning in recent years? To answer this, we summarized the manufacturing industry into 3-digit sub-sector (25 sub-sectors) and evaluated the entire manufacturing industry. Our study covers 15 years of production cycles (2000–2014). Using data envelopment analysis and loglinear learning models, we empirically estimated the productivity and technological learning of these industries. The result shows negative (− 0.6%) total factor productivity (TFP) growth between 2000 and 2014. TFP was particularly affected by 2001, and 2008/2009 financial crisis. TFP regress also deepened in recent years (2011–2014) which we blamed on both internal and external shocks in the system. We showed that positive TFP observed in other years resulted from technical progress and efficiency improvement. Industry-level results were consistent with the annual mean result which suggest a common economic downturn. Estimated progress ratios from learning models show that individual industry exhibits unique learning rates, with some industries showing technological learning (i.e., decreasing unit cost of production) between 2000 and 2007 and others between 2010 and 2014. Industries viz. production machinery, electrical devices and circuit, chemical, pharmaceutical, and food manufacturing showed sustained learning between 2001 and 2013, implying huge cost saving as outputs expand. The overall result, however, showed that learning got worst and was lost at some point between 2008 and 2014. We conclude that productivity differentials explained by learning rates show that technological progress and innovations in Japanese manufacturing were capital intensive and cost inefficient and that Japanese manufacturing industry has not fully regained its competitiveness as the world’s leading manufacturing hub. We argued that for productivity improvement in Japanese manufacturing industries, there is a need for policy thrust to restore and ensure sustained learning within and across the industries.

Waste decomposition analysis in Japanese manufacturing sectors for material flow cost accounting

From the perspective of material flow cost accounting (MFCA), which treats both material and financial flows within a company, this study proposes a corporate waste decomposition model to investigate the effects of material and financial factors on corporate waste generation. The proposed model decomposes waste into the material loss (waste ratio of raw materials [WRMat]), raw material-to-cost ratio (RtCR; material use efficiency), cost-to-sales ratio (or COGSR), total asset turnover ratio (TATR), leverage, and total equity. As an application, the waste decomposition analysis is performed using the log-mean Divisia index (LMDI) method, and 125 listed firms in 5 Japanese manufacturing sectors from 2010 to 2015 are analyzed. The LMDI results show that the RtCR, the most crucial term in MFCA, had the largest effect on increases in waste generation as of 2015; however, this effect is not so robust among sectors over the years, implying that MFCA is valid mainly for specific companies/sectors or years. Also, corporate environmental burdens (waste and carbon emission) are likely to be correlated negatively with leverage and positively with total equity in the models, implying that the financial and stock markets have an essential role in deciding corporate environmental burdens.

Comments by Jan M. Podivinsky, on The Effect of Import Competition on Wages in the Japanese Manufacturing Sector

February 01 2018 Comments by Jan M. Podivinsky, on The Effect of Import Competition on Wages in the Japanese Manufacturing Sector Author and Article Information Online Issn: 1536-0083 Print Issn: 1535-3516 © 2018 by the Asian Economic Panel and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology2018Massachusetts Institute of Technology Asian Economic Papers (2018) 17 (1): 68–69. https://doi.org/10.1162/asep_a_00599 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Comments by Jan M. Podivinsky, on The Effect of Import Competition on Wages in the Japanese Manufacturing Sector. Asian Economic Papers 2018; 17 (1): 68–69. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/asep_a_00599 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsAsian Economic Papers Search Advanced Search Jan M. Podivinsky: This paper is motivated by earlier research on the effect of increased import competition in final goods markets upon domestic employment and wages. Although much of this research points to negative effects of import competition on wages, there is some evidence of a positive effect upon firms’ productivity, potentially increasing wages for these firms’ workers. Much of this evidence is based on worker-level panel data, in a range of developed and developing countries. The notable exception is Japan, where such worker-level panel data do not exist because government surveys do not contain worker identification information. Endoh addresses this exception and provides a significant addition to this literature, by first constructing a viable matched worker-firm panel for Japan, and then using this panel to provide the first evidence for the effects of import competition in final goods markets upon wages in Japan. Endoh approaches the construction of a... You do not currently have access to this content.

The Effect of Import Competition on Wages in the Japanese Manufacturing Sector

This study estimates the effect of import competition in the final goods market on workers’ wages in the Japanese manufacturing sector by constructing a panel of matched worker–firm data for 1998–2013 wages. The baseline results show that import competition does not decrease unskilled workers’ wages and increases the skill premia of workers with college degrees or those in managerial and professional positions. Large firms and firms with low productivity also increased their wage premia through import competition, but the degree of increase due to firm-level factors is much smaller than that due to factors related to workers’ skill.

Comments by Frank Walsh, on The Effect of Import Competition on Wages in the Japanese Manufacturing Sector

February 01 2018 Comments by Frank Walsh, on The Effect of Import Competition on Wages in the Japanese Manufacturing Sector Author and Article Information Online Issn: 1536-0083 Print Issn: 1535-3516 © 2018 by the Asian Economic Panel and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology2018Massachusetts Institute of Technology Asian Economic Papers (2018) 17 (1): 69–70. https://doi.org/10.1162/asep_a_00586 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Comments by Frank Walsh, on The Effect of Import Competition on Wages in the Japanese Manufacturing Sector. Asian Economic Papers 2018; 17 (1): 69–70. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/asep_a_00586 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsAsian Economic Papers Search Advanced Search Frank Walsh: This paper makes a number of important contributions. In terms of data, a new worker firm panel is assembled by combining data across a range of surveys. This allows the author to control for a range of characteristics including firm-level fixed effects. This makes the evidence much more convincing. Although it is unfortunate that data constraints prevent the author from tracing workers over time, a range of worker individual-level controls are included. Hummels et al. (2014) is discussed as a reference for the instrumental variables (IV) approach adopted in the paper. In this approach, the world export supply net of home country imports is used as an instrument for offshoring. Interestingly, Hummels et al. (2014) also use world import demand net of home country exports as an instrument for exports, which might be interesting for future work. The estimated IV effects for annual income... You do not currently have access to this content.

Changes in the international specialization of food manufacturing industry in East Asia

There has been a tremendous advance in the negotiations of international trade and investments to promote the development of world economy since 2000. However, studies on the changes in the international specialization along with the rapid growth of new emerging economies are insufficient, especially for food manufacturing industry. Therefore, the objectives of our study are to understand the actual situation of the international specialization of food manufacturing in East Asia and to clarify the mechanism of its change in the structures of trade since the 21st century. The following results are obtained from our empirical analysis. First, the patterns of international specialization in East Asia’s food manufacturing industry have been changed in two broad ways since 2000, one is corresponded by China for intra-industry trade and the other is corresponded by Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan for the inter-industry trade. Second, FDI from Japanese food manufacturing industry has the characteristics of horizontal direct investment (in one-way trade), and its effect of promoting international division of labor through intra-industry trade in East Asia is expected to be insignificant. Third, against the backdrop of its domestic economic growth, China’s food manufacturing industry is growing and its intra-industry trade is advancing with countries both inside and outside of East Asia. Based on the above analytical results, a policy implication is drawn for Japanese food manufacturing sector to realize a sustainable development by building a food system which is mutually complementary in international specialization through two-way trade with the countries in East Asia, particularly with China.

International Influences on Japanese Supply Chains

This paper investigates the transmission mechanism of Chinese productivity shocks through industry-level and firm-level networks in the Japanese manufacturing sector using an instrumental variable approach. We find that increased Chinese productivity in a particular industry negatively affects Japanese suppliers of Japanese firms in that industry (upstream propagation) and positively affects their Japanese corporate customers (downstream propagation). This is different from the recently studied case of the United States, which did not lead to evidence for downstream propagation of such shocks.

Exports, Exchange Rates and Productivity: An Analysis of the Japanese Manufacturing Sectors

This paper examines the effects of exchange rate changes and productivity on manufacturing exports. Using the dataset of the Japanese manufacturing firms during the period, 2002 – 2012, we discuss if exchange rate fluctuations deter export activities and if productivity and markup differences affect it. For this study, we estimate both firm specific productivity and markups by the production function based approaches and incorporate them into the Heckman sample selection model. Our results show exchange rates are important factors to affect firm-level exports as a whole while temporal aggregation should be carefully considered. In addition, this study also reveals that productivity and markup give different impacts on firm-level exports across industries. In the transportation equipment industry, negative effects of appreciation on exports are partly mitigated by higher productivity. Markups are positively related to exports in the electronics industry while negative in the transportation equipment. Neither productivity nor markup absorbs the impact of exchange rate changes in the machinery industry. Those findings imply that stability of exchange rates is very important while the effective trade policy may vary across industries following their trade structure.

Start-up Dynamics In Japan: Comparative Evidence From the Dynemp v.2 Database

The present paper describes the patterns of entry and post-entry growth in the Japanese manufacturing sector over the 2001–2007 period, pointing to similarities and differences with other countries. The paper also presents a detailed characterization of start-up dynamics at a more detailed (two-digit) sectoral level within the manufacturing sector. The analysis shows that in Japan the entry and growth of start-ups contribute relatively little to net job creation, as compared to other countries. The main reasons are a particularly low start-up rate and a growth rate of surviving new businesses that is among the lowest in the sample of countries analysed.

The Competitiveness Strategies of Japanese Manufacturing Sectors since, Abenomics and their Implications

Sakong, Mok.June, 2016.The competitiveness strategies of Japanese manufacturing sectors since abenomics and their implications,Articles,[Sejong, South Korea]Korea Institute for Economy&Trade,13

Did the financial crisis affect environmental efficiency? evidence from the Japanese manufacturing sector

This study examined the impact of the financial crisis on the environmental and technical efficiencies of the Japanese manufacturing industry. Overall, we found that while the crisis had a negative impact on technical efficiency, it did not affect environmental efficiency—the only exception was the transportation equipment sector which improved its environmental efficiency following the crisis. Additionally, we found that capital intensity does not necessarily affect environmental efficiency. We discuss the implications of these findings and provide directions for future research.

Orthopaedic Healthcare Worldwide: The Role of Standardization in Improving Outcomes.

Orthopaedic Healthcare Worldwide: The Role of Standardization in Improving Outcomes.

Non-linear transition mechanism of production and Japanese development

This study theoretically clarifies the non-linear transition mechanism of production and Japanese economic development. This mechanism is empirically known but the precise nature of the shifts is unclear and has yet to be specified theoretically. The study focuses on four factors: economies of scale, the operating rate, the vintage facilities, and the international transfer of facilities, all of which would impact on the transition mechanism and from which a new model is derived. This model demonstrates the jumping processes involved in production highlighting the existences of thresholds, which induce them. These thresholds relate to the identified factors and which provide an explanation for rapid increases and sudden declines in production. This study investigates specific cases of such changes in the Japanese manufacturing sector and reviews the role of these four factors. Illustrated is the non-linear nature of the transition mechanism in its effect on the Japanese economic growth.