With maturity in the microfinance market in South Asia, it is observed that some microfinance members' needs grow beyond the boundaries of traditional microfinance group loans. In addition, there are other small enterprises whose needs are not met by microfinance institutions or commercial...

The level of financial inclusion in Uzbekistan remains low: the majority of households and firms, rather than using formal finance, save and borrow informally, and few use digital finance products. Both indicate the high cost of finance as the top reason for not using it. Secondly, households,...

This paper analyzes the impacts of the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, which were amplified by a failure of coordination across the plant, corporate, industrial, and regulatory levels, resulting in a nuclear catastrophe, comparable in cost to...

The efficient operation of sewerage services is impacted by various factors such as geographical and topographical conditions, diversity of vertical and horizontal organizational structure, ownership types, and level of public-private partnership. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport...

The labor share in Japan has been declining significantly over the last three decades, accompanied by persistent stagnation and an unprecedented increase in economic inequalities. Since these dynamics are likely to be interrelated, understanding the drivers of the labor share might contribute...

This paper explores whether trade can explain a part of the sharp decline in the labor share of Indian formal industries from around 30% in 1980 to less than 10% in 2014. Decline in strikes and lockouts, reduced labor time lost from disputes per factory and increased use of contract workers in...

This paper attempts to identify the firm and country-related factors that determine a firm's probability of participating in global value chains (GVCs) and level of GVC participation by using data from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys, covering 111 countries and 38,966 firms for the...

This study assesses the determinants of global value chain (GVC) participation and the relationship between the degree of GVC participation and firms' performance. The main estimation method for both analyses is a panel fixed-effect regression employing unique panel firm-level data from the...

We investigate the long-term drivers of the labor share in Japan using data from the Japanese Industrial Productivity database from 1970 to 2012. The descriptive and econometric results indicate that the decline in the labor share observed in Japan during the period of analysis was highly...

This paper focuses on the pricing behavior of Japanese and United States firms selling their identical products in New York City, Chicago, Osaka, and Tokyo. The authors utilize some simple models of international price dispersion and market segmentation that generate predictions about testable...