Unit labor cost (ULC) is defined as labor compensation per value added. It captures the cost competitiveness of industries and countries. As labor compensation is wage multiplied by hours worked or number of people employed, it is easy to show that ULC is wage divided by labor productivity....

This study aims to estimate electricity demand functions in Japan's industrial and commercial sectors. We adopt data from the Energy Consumption Statistics by Prefecture by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Japan, to delineate the demand between the industrial and commercial sector....

This study intends to understand how disaster is related to countries' production efficiency using a sample of 137 countries over 1980 - 2011. We analyze the effect of the number of man-made and natural disaster occurrences on countries' technological change (swift of the frontier) and...

Japan has many input-output tables, national and regional. We focus on the Nagoya metropolitan area, in which Toyota Motors is headquartered along with many industries manufacturing transport equipment, machine tools and other machinery. This area is included in the region covered by three...

We introduce a class of production function whose inputs and outputs constitute multiples of quality and quantity. Under the efficiency unit approach, we precisely reduce innovation regarding qualitative and quantitative improvements of production to the measurement of quality-adjusted...

This study analyzes the impact of international trade on environmental efficiency. Using a data envelopment analysis (DEA) model that allows us to treat undesirable outputs and super-efficiency beyond unity, we measure the environmental efficiency of four typical air pollutants-SO 2 , NOx,...

The paper studies the properties of the productive structure of a region and national economies within the region. We use input-output data to calculate and compare input-output linkages and complex network measures of centrality to identify the most important sectors. We found that the most...

Over the past several decades, significant efforts have been made to regulate the use of resource and pollution in most industrialized countries, and the stringency of pollution regulations has continued to increase globally. At the same time, physical and social infrastructures are influenced...

This paper analyzes productivity with a directional distance function model by investigating convexity and non-convexity in the Chinese banking sector. Two primary findings are summarized. First, there is a distinct change in productivity between large versus small banks and public versus...

In the context of world value chains, the manner in which production occurs has made more difficult to judge countries' export quality, given that the international division of labor is arranged around phases of the production process, some of which are sophisticated and others uncomplicated....