Japan’s energy security is more vulnerable today than it was before the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident in March 2011. To alleviate its energy vulnerability, Japan has no choice but to improve energy efficiency. To aid in this improvement, this study compares Japan’s energy...

This paper measures the metafrontier total-factor energy efficiency (TFEE) of 47 regions in Japan for the period 1996–2008, using the stochastic frontier analysis (SFA). The two-step output-oriented SFA approach by Huang et al. (J Prod Anal 42:241–254, 2014) is followed but converted into a...

Political conflicts among trading partners have changed their forms with ever-increasing flows of foreign direct investment. A decrease in the exports of Japan might merely be a reflection of a global production shift by Japanese multinational corporations. We investigate the effect of Japanese...

Recognizing goods produced in different sub-regions within a country as distinct differentiated products, we offer new evidence of variety expansion in nation’s export. We decompose Japanese national exports into prefecture sub-regions and construct extensive margins and intensive margins of...

This paper contributes to the existing empirical investigation of Japan-Korea international trade by providing new evidence of intra-industry trade between Korea and Japanese sub-regions. Taking advantage of a Japanese international trade dataset disaggregated by sub-regions, we calculate the...

In this study, we investigate the dynamics of the trilateral trade relationship among the U.S., Japan and an emerging economy in the Pacific Basin. Our particular attention is paid to two emerging countries; China and Mexico. In what we call the “triangular trade approach,” we explore how...