The past few decades have seen a significant rise in foreign direct investment (FDI) worldwide. While Japanese companies have actively contributed to this trend, FDI in Japan continues to be much lower than in other countries. This paper explores the history of both outward and inward FDI in...

This book is a concerted attempt by economists to investigate and offer remedies for some of the difficulties associated with an ageing labor market.

By merging two newly created databases for the analysis of prefecture-level productivity—the R-JIP Database 2013 and the R-LTES Database 2013—with other regional statistics, we examine how and why "aged prefectures" differ from other prefectures. Our main findings can be summarized as...

This paper describes the construction of the Regional-Level Japan Industrial Productivity Database (R-JIP), which covers the period from 1970 through 2008 and comprises annual industrial output and factor input data of Japan's 47 prefectures classified by 23 industry. Output is measured in terms...

(Introduction) The purpose of this paper is to explain the preliminary version of the newly compiled Japan Industrial Productivity Database (JIP 2006) and report some results of our growth accounting analysis based on this database. The JIP 2006 contains information on 108 sectors from 1970 to...

This paper measures the productivity disparities between self-employed workers (i.e. business owners and unpaid family workers) and employees by estimating a production function based on enterprise-level micro data from the Census of Manufactures between 1981 and 2000. As a result, we find that,...

Using establishment-level data from the Basic Survey of Human Resources Development for 2006, we estimate both the determinants and the impact of training. In the probit analysis, we find that larger firms /establishments and more productive firms have a higher probability of providing training,...

We construct a cross-prefectural index of human capital that captures the quality of the labor force available to the 47 Japanese prefectures from 1970 through 2008 using the Population Census. Our index is based on the index number concept proposed by Caves, Christensen, and Diewert (1982), and...

Although by the early 2000s, Japan had largely overcome its non-performing loan problems, economic growth hardly accelerated, resulting in what now are "two lost decades." This paper examines the underlying reasons from a long-term and structural perspective. Major issues examined include the...

Applying a common empirical approach to comparable industry-level data on production, trade, and labor markets for Japan and South Korea, this paper aims to investigate the impacts of outsourcing on different sectors of the labor market focusing on differences in educational attainment. While...