Diversity and Change: Asian American and Pacific Islander Workers

About 7.4 million Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) work in the United States, making up 5.3 percent of the total U.S. workforce. About 7.1 million of these AAPI workers are Asian Americans; about 300,000 are Pacific Islanders. The AAPI workforce is almost 20 times larger today than it was in 1960. Meanwhile, the share of AAPIs in the total workforce has increased about tenfold over the same period. Three broad themes emerge from our analysis of the data: The first is that AAPI workers are highly diverse. The second theme is that AAPI workers face many challenges in the labor market. The final theme is that the trends in the economic circumstances of AAPI workers have closely mirrored those of the broader workforce

Foreign-Affiliate Activity and U.S. Skill Upgrading

There has been little analysis of the impact of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) on U.S. wage inequality, even though the presence of foreign-owned affiliates in the United States has arguably grown more rapidly in significance for the U.S. economy than trade flows. Using data across U.S. manufacturing from 1977 to 1994, this paper tests whether inward flows of FDI contributed to within-industry shifts in U.S. relative labor demand toward more-skilled labor. We generally find that inward FDI has not contributed to U.S. within-industry skill upgrading; in fact, the wave of Japanese greenfield investments in the 1980s was significantly correlated with lower, not higher, relative demand for skilled labor. This finding is consistent with recent models of multinational enterprises in which foreign affiliates focus on activities less skilled-labor intensive than the activities of their parent firms. It also suggests that if inward FDI brought new technologies into the United States, the induced technological change was not biased towards skilled labor.

"Automobiles: Strategy-based Lean Production System"

The present situations and future prospects of the Japanese automobile industry are discussed. Selected topics in this paper include the following: analyses of the basic product-industry characteristics of the automobile (e.g., product architecture); the mature of the dynamic competition in the world auto industry; competitive performance (e.g., productivity) of the Japanese auto makers; organizational capabilities of better Japanese firms in production, development and procurement; overall environments in the 1990s; the concept of "balanced lean" system and its adaptation to environmental changes; new flexible production systems that cope with volume fluctuation; architectural strategies of the auto firms; modularization of parts; M&A and alliance; future of the automobile technologies and architectures; future of the capability-building competition.

Determinants of high-royalty contracts and the impact of stronger protection of intellectual property rights in Japan

This paper first reviews how Japan has strengthened the protection of intellectual property rights (IPRs), focusing on the expansion of the patentable subject matter, the restriction of the possibility of compulsory licensing, stronger deterrence against infringement and the introduction of the doctrine of equivalents. Second, based on the statistical analysis of sector-level panel data, it shows that (1)R&D intensity of domestic industry, trademark licensing, cross-licensing and, to a smaller degree, monopoly provisions are the significant determinants of the incidence of high-royalty contracts, and (2)Stronger protection of intellectual property rights looks to have increased the incidence of high-royalty contracts in the latter part of 1990s in the Japanese industries for which patent is important for appropriability.Intellectual property rights, Licensing contract, Appropriability, Patent

"Government-Firm Relationship in Postwar Japan: Success and Failure of the Bureau-Pluralism"

In this paper, we identify the common organizational and institutional factor behind the success and failure of the Japanese economy, focusing on the industrial policy and the government-firm relationship. The key concept is the bureau-pluralism. The bureau-pluralism in Japan is an outcome of path dependent evolution of the economic system. Based on the experiences during WWII, the bureau-pluralistic system, including deliberative councils and industrial associations, evolved, which worked efficiently to coordinate economic growth in 1950fs and the high growth era. Its effectiveness was supported by the condition that industries were highly complementary in this period. Consequently, on one hand, there were few serious conflicts among industries and their counterparts in the bureaucracy, which made it possible to avoid the bad influence of the conservative bias, due to the vested interests of the existing industries. On the other hand, this complementarity was sources of numerous coordination failures in the various aspects of the economy. In order to detect and resolve these coordination failures quickly, the decentralized decision making and horizontal coordination of the bureau-pluralism worked efficiently. However, the same attribute of the bureau-pluralism impeded the Japanese economy to adapt to the change of the global economy since 1980fs. First, the newly growing industrial fields as information and telecommunication, were across the border of existing industries and therefore the bureaucratic jurisdiction, which caused serious jurisdiction disputes among ministries. Second, the reforms necessary to adapt to the global change collided with the interests of the existing industries and ministries. Those jurisdiction disputes and the conflicts with the vested interests are difficult for the bureau-pluralism to resolve.