Focusing on Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Chinese firms in the manufacturing sector, this paper examines productivity catch-up at the firm level using the distance from the technology frontier as a direct measure of the potential for catch-up. We also examine the role of absorptive capacity...

Studies comparing regional income in Japan before and after World War II have frequently drawn a picture of radical change from an economy characterized by large regional disparities to one characterized by small regional disparities. This paper comes to a very different conclusion. Based on...

Following the standard methodology for measuring industry-of-origin or productionside PPPs, this study compares the unit values of manufacturing products in China, Japan, Korea and the US to calculate unit value ratios (UVRs) and hence estimates PPPs for individual manufacturing industries using...