Does Offshoring Pay? Firm-Level Evidence From Japan

This paper explores the impact of offshoring, or contracting out of business activities to foreign providers, on firm productivity, using Japanese firm-level data for the period 1994-2000. We find that offshoring has generally a positive effect on productivity growth. This effect is robust to controlling for the possible endogeneity of offshoring with respect to unobserved productivity shocks. Our preferred specification suggests that a one percent increase in offshoring intensity raises productivity growth by 0.17 percent. For the average offshoring firm this implies a 1.8 percent increase in annual productivity growth. These results do not appear to depend much on either the level of technological sophistication of a firms' industry or a firms' international orientation. However, we find that the scope for productivity improvements from offshoring depends negatively on the initial level of productivity of the firm.offshoring, international insourcing, domestic sourcing, TFP

The Environment for Microdata Access in Japan: A Comparison with the United States and Britain and Future Issues

For most of the post]war period, Japan's administration of statistics was governed by the framework provided by the Statistics Act from 1947. However, because the Act remained largely unchanged since it was originally introduced, it increasingly failed to reflect important changes in economic and social circumstances over time, resulting in various problems, including with regard to the secondary use of various kinds of microdata. To help resolve these problems, the New Statistics Act was enacted in 2007 and came fully into force in April 2009. Among other things, the New Statistics Act provides for a substantial revision of the system of secondary data use. An important element of this is a change in the basic philosophy underlying the legal framework from "statistics for the purpose of administration" to "statistics as an information resource for society." A central aim is ensuring the gusefulnessh of public statistics, and regulations concerning the use of statistics, such as provisions for secondary use, were incorporated in the Act. One important change is that the system of approval by the Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications for secondary data use was abolished. Instead, secondary data use can now be directly approved by the survey implementer and procedures have been simplified, so in the new system secondary data use now is considerably easier. Moreover, the New Statistics Act now allows for the provision of anonymized data and for custom tabulations for the purpose of academic research and higher education.

The Location of Japanese MNCs Affiliates: Agglomeration Spillovers and Firm Heterogeneity

This study examines the determinants of location choices of foreign affiliates by manufacturing Japanese firms, using a new data set that matches parents and their affiliates created over the years 1995-2003. The analysis is based on new economic geography theory and thus focuses on the effect of market and supplier access, as well as production and trade costs. Our interest is twofold. First, we investigate the importance of agglomeration and spillover effects on the firms' decision through the use of proxies relating to the presence of Japanese affiliates in the host countries as well as to that of Japanese multinational firms at home. Overall, our results confirm the economic importance of information sharing and network effects both at home and in the host country beside traditional determinants pertaining to production and transaction costs and access and supply access. Second, we explore whether the effects of key determinants of locational choice vary substantially depending on the characteristics of the investing firm and the plant. We find less productive and smaller parents to be more likely to create an affiliate in China rather than in Western Europe or an OECD country. Moreover less productive firms appear to be more sensitive to distance-related costs and low institutional quality while being more responsive to the presence of Japanese firms and JETRO presence in the host country.

What Causes Plant Closure within Multi-Plant Firms?

This paper investigates why plants belonging to multi-plant firms are more likely to exit. Using Japanese plant data linked to firm data we study the process of plant closure among domestic multi-plant firms as well as multi-plant multinationals. As elsewhere in the literature these organisational forms are found to raise the probability of plant exit despite the superior characteristics of the plants they own. We find that the domestic multi-plant ownership effect is attributable to these firms closing the weakest elements of the firm. We reject the idea of multinationals being ‘footloose’ but instead find a residual effect of multinational ownership which reduces the probability of plant death when we control for the process of closure within those firms.Exit, Multinational Firms, Multi-plant firms, International Trade

An International Comparison of the TFP Levels of Japanese, Korean and Cinese Listed Firms

The study group on the Creation of a Productivity Database on Japanese, Chinese, and South Korean Firms at the Japan Center for Economic Research (JCER), in conjunction with the Center for Economic Institutions (CEI) of Hitotsubashi University, the Center for China and Asian Studies (CCAS) of Nippon University, and the Center for Corporate Competitiveness of Seoul National University, has compiled the East Asian Listed Companies Database 2007 (EALC 2007). In this paper, we explain the methodology and data sources used in the construction of the EALC 2007. We also conduct some descriptive analysis based on the EALC 2007. To compare the TFP level of firms in these countries, we first estimated the TFP of firms in each country using the method of Good, Nadiri and Sickles (1997). Then we estimated the relative TFP by industry in the benchmark year using Japanese industries as benchmarks and combined the estimated TFP of firms. When estimating relative TFP by industry for Korea and China, we applied the industry-level price estimates of the three countries from the ICPA project and converted industry outputs and inputs into the same currency unit (Japanese Yen). The estimation results obtained indicate that the productivity of Japanese firms is still higher than that of their Chinese and Korean counterparts but that the productivity of Korean firms is rapidly increasing, with the emergence of some firms that are now overtaking their Japanese rivals in terms of productivity, particularly in the electric machinery sector.Total Factor Productivity, International Comparison, Competitiveness

Nihon seizogyo ni okeru R&D katsudo to seisansei: Kigyo level data ni yoru jisshobunseki (in Japanese)

R&D, productivity, panel data

An International Comparison of the TFP Levels and the Productivity Convergence of Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Chinese Listed Firms (Extended Version)

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 for technological catch-up by including variables such as R&D expenditure and foreign ownership in our empirical estimation. We find that the national frontier has a stronger pull on domestic firms than the regional frontier, which is in line with findings by Bartelsman, Haskel and Martin (2008). This result indicates that policies to raise the technology level of national frontier firms are beneficial for all firms in that country.productivity, catch-up, absorptive capacity

An International Comparison of the TFP Levels and the Productivity Convergence of Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese and Chinese Listed Firms

In this paper, we analyzed productivity catching up at the firm level in the Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese and Chinese manufacturing sector using the distance from the global technological frontier as a direct measure of the potential for technological frontier. We also examined the role of the absorption capacity for the technological catch-up by including the variables, such as R&D expenditure and foreign ownership in our empirical estimation model. Our main results can be summarized as follows. First, although Japanese firms enjoy the highest average TFP level in many industries, their TFP growth rate has been relatively low during the past two decades. Taiwanese and Korean firms have achieved considerably high TFP growth in certain industries, and the some firms in the industries almost caught up or exceeded the Japanese firms' TFP level. The average TFP level of Chinese firms is still much lower than that of Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese firms in many industries. Second, in Korea, the TFP levels of low-performing firms are approaching those of the national frontier firms at a more rapid pace than in other countries. In addition, Korean firms try to catch up the global frontier once they reached to the national frontier level TFP. Chinese firms are very slow in catching up and the only engine of the knowledge creation is firms located in the trade-oriented coast. Third, in the all four countries, the speed of the convergence of the firms far from the national frontier is faster than the firms near the frontier.