The relationship between large enterprises (LEs) and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Japan has undergone major changes during the long-term recession since 1991. While SMEs still play the important role of supplying parts and components to LEs through subcontracting, many LEs have started...

The Great East Japan Earthquake on 11 March 2011 was the biggest earthquake recorded in Japanese seismic history, and the fourth largest recorded in the world. The scope of the disaster far exceeded that of the Hanshin Earthquake of 1995. The repercussions of this disaster spread far beyond the...

Many studies discuss the “de-industrialization” or “servicification” of economies in both developed and developing countries. Such studies rely on statistics that distinguish a manufacturing from a service sector. But in the age of global value chains (GVCs), it becomes increasingly...

The objective of this paper is to study how manufacturing plants in India adjusted to trade liberalization during the period 1998-99 to 2007-08. We estimate how the labor share changed due to tariff reduction. Our results indicate that a decline in output tariffs led to an increase in the labor...

This paper analyzes the reasons for the middle income trap in Latin America, where countries have been at the middle income level for decades, and draws out lessons for Asia. The middle income trap captures a situation where a middle income country can no longer compete internationally in...

The People's Republic of China (PRC) has been undergoing marvelous industrialization and manufacturing development in the past decades, which has promoted its fast economic growth and has reached a level of middle-income in recent years. It is widely accepted that the PRC's status as the...

Given that India's urban areas contribute to nearly two-thirds of its gross domestic product, even though they account for only 31% of the country's population, they have been rightly called the engines of India's growth. In this paper, I answer the following questions: What are the economic...

Does financial health shore up firm productivity? This paper empirically investigates this question and presents productivity as another driving factor in translating financial development into real economic progress. Our empirical framework employs Levinsohn and Petrin's (2003) semi-parametric...

The global economic slowdown has again highlighted the vulnerability of export-led development models and economies to downturns in export markets. Economic deepening or rebalancing with an emphasis on service-sector development should be - and is becoming - one long-term response to the crisis...

The global economic slowdown has again highlighted the vulnerability of export-led development models and economies to downturns in export markets. Economic deepening or “rebalancing” with an emphasis on service-sector development should be - and is becoming - one long-term response to the...