A Spatial Structural Decomposition Analysis of Chinese and Japanese Energy Demand: 1985–1990

This paper proposes a spatial structural decomposition analysis to measure the effects of the changes in intra- and inter-country linkages on the embodied energy demand in the concerned country. For the empirical analysis, we have used the China- Japan inter-country input–output tables for 1985 and 1990, expressed in constant prices of 1990. The empirical results reveal that (1) at least for the period between 1985 and 1990, the effects of the non-competitive input structural changes in China on the primary energy requirements of Japan were negligible, and (2) the contribution of the Japanese final demand shifts on the total change in Chinese primary energy demand was 40 times larger than that of the Chinese final demand shifts on the primary energy requirements of Japan. The Japanese policy makers should concentrate on the energy impacts of the changes in the domestic production structure rather than the changes in the Chinese production structure.     

日本企业文化导入商务日语教学

中国近些年提高了国外企业到中国投资的门槛,在此背景下,来华投资的日企也提高了对商务日语人才的要求,希望其对日本企业文化有更多了解,以便更快更好地融入日企工作。本文从商务日语教学现状出发,结合日本企业人才需求状况,分析日本企业文化在商务日语教学中的重要性,探讨日本企业文化导入商务日语教学的对策。     

Organisation vs. culture: Japanese automotive transplants in the US

It has long been argued that the Japanese production organization is culture-bound and therefore not transferable to other countries. This article examines seven major Japanese automobile assembly plants and over 270 Japanese automotive parts suppliers in the US. The successful transfer of Japanese work and production organization in these ‘transplants’ suggests that Japanese production practices are organizational forms which can be uncoupled from Japanese culture and transferred to other countries.     

Productivity dispersion: facts,theory, and implications

This paper discusses the stylized facts, the theory, and the remaining problems of productivity dispersion, which is essentially related to the concept of equilibrium in the neoclassical theory. Empirical study of data relating to Japanese firms shows that they all obey the Pareto law, and also that the Pareto index decreases with the level of aggregation. In order to explain these two stylized facts we propose a theoretical framework built on the basic principle of statistical physics and on the concept of superstatistics, an approach that accommodates fluctuations of aggregate demand. We show that the allocation of production factors depends crucially on the level of aggregate demand, and that the higher the level of aggregate demand, the closer the economy is to the frontier of the production possibility set.     

浅析高职赴日留学现状——以苏州工业园区服务外包职业学院为例

本文在苏州工业园区服务外包职业学院2014年赴日留学生情况调研结果的基础上,结合国内的留学趋势以及专业人才需求,总结日语教育模式以及对日文化交流的经验,在与日本院校的交流与日语社团活动、日语教学和赴日培训方面为高职院校培养日语人才提供一定的参考。     

A model of intersectoral flow of technology using technology and innovation flow matrices

This paper builds a simple general equilibrium model that sheds new light on the mechanism of intersectoral flows of technology. It explicitly models the production of technology using diverse technology components as inputs. The model shows that demand shocks do not cause innovation while technology shocks as deviations from a balanced growth path induce asymmetric productivity changes across sectors. We also conduct a simple quantitative analysis using recent Japanese R&D data, which shows that most productivity effects remain within the bounds of the sector. We find some important exceptions to this rule, however, in particular for shocks occurring in information technology and precision instruments.     

与经济发展相适应的高校日语教学

近年来,随着社会经济的发展日语人才需求量的增加,各高校纷纷成立日语专业。正确引导学生们完成角色的转变,尽快让他们形成自主自觉学习的习惯,使培养出来的学生能够尽快的适应职业环境,毕业就能在工作岗位上独挡一面。为实现培养日语专业人才,高等院校深化教学改革,教学过程就变得越发关键。     

Local Agglomeration and Global Networks Of the Semiconductor Industry: a Comparative Study of U.S. and Japanese Firms

The objective of this study is to examine the spatial organization of the U.S. and Japanese firms in the semiconductor industry. Our analyses give special consideration to the nature of the activities undertaken in the semiconductor production processes, the nature of the firm organization, the nature of the firm ownership, and the geographical area of analysis. Our approach is essentially diagrammatic in order to incorporate all the above factors. Therefore, unlike past studies, our study places special emphasis on tracing the connections between the whole spatial chain of production activities. The result is that different stages within the semiconductor production process have different geographical features, and that even the same vertically integrated sectors in the semi-conductor industry that differ by Japanese or U.S. ownership have quite different geo-graphical organizations.     

Why Are Concavity Conditions Not Satisfied in the Cost Function? The Case of Japanese Manufacturing Firms during the Bubble Period*

This paper examines empirically the reasons why Japanese manufacturing firms frequently fail to satisfy concavity of the cost function in input prices. We focus on the ‘bubble period’ in the 1980s when land was in great demand and land prices soared. By estimating the translog cost function with land as one of production inputs, we find that violation of concavity mainly resulted from weak bank–firm relationship and massive transactions of land. We also demonstrate that elasticities of substitution between land and other inputs are estimated quite differently if the firms violating concavity are not excluded from the analysis.     

Structural Change and Labor Requirement of the Japanese Economy

This paper extends the framework of input–output decomposition analysis into a model which decomposes changes in the labor requirement of an economy into effects of occupational substitution, changes in labor productivity and changes in material inputs. By application of this model to the Japanese experience it was found that the most important characteristic of the evolution of the Japanese labor force in the period 1975–85 was the replacement of blue collar workers by highly skilled professionals and technicians. Both technical change and changes in the structure of final demand fostered the increasing demand for professionals and technicians. As the mix of employment shifted towards high knowledge level occupations, Japan's labor productivity increased sharply.     

How does a firm’s management of greenhouse gas emissions influence its economic performance? Analyzing effects through demand and productivity in Japanese manufacturing firms

This paper analyzes how a firm’s management of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions affects its economic performance. The theoretical model we derive from Cobb–Douglas production and inverse demand functions predict that in conducting GHG emissions management, a firm will enhance its economic performance because it promotes an increase in demand for its output and improves its productivity. The estimation results, using panel data on Japanese manufacturing firms during the period 2007–2008, support the view that a firm’s GHG emissions management enhances a firm’s economic performance through an increase in demand and improvement in productivity. However, the latter effect is conditional. Although a firm’s efforts to maintain lower GHG emissions improves productivity, efforts to reduce GHG emissions further does not always improve it, especially for energy-intensive firms. Because firms attempting to maintain lower GHG emissions are more likely to improve their productivity, there is a possibility that firms with high GHG emissions can also enhance economic performance by reducing their emissions in the long term, even if additional costs are incurred. In addition, better GHG emissions management increases the demand of environmentally conscious customers because a product’s life cycle GHG emissions in the upper stream of the supply chain influence those in the lower stream, and customers evaluate the suppliers’ GHG emissions management in terms of green supply-chain management.     

航空服务专业中日语课程教学研究

近些年来,随着全球化进程的不断深化,国家间的交流活动进入了一个高速发展的阶段,也使得社会对航空服务人才、管理人才的需求大大增加。在此基础上,如何在高职院校航空服务专业教学中,培养出一批适应时代需求的高素质、应用型且具备优秀外语应用能的人才队伍已经成为广泛关注的教学焦点。本文即从航空服务专业日语课程实际出发,探讨相关问题,以期就提升高职航空服务专业日语教学质量提出相关有益建议。     

The Future of Japanese Manufacturing in the UK

The expansion of Japanese FDI into the UK manufacturing sector during the 1980s and early 1990s gave rise to the debate on the Japanization of British industry. The paper argues that this debate was constructed from a Western perspective. It did not locate the strategies and structures of Japanese subsidiaries within the broader context of how Japanese multinational corporations were evolving in this period. The necessity to look at these issues from a more global perspective is reinforced by the changes which have occurred since the mid 1990s in the environment for Japanese multinationals. The global economy offers more choices to firms about their location as well as facing them with a more competitive environment. In the Japanese case, this is leading to a growing differentiation between standardized mass production (which can be located in Asia and Eastern Europe) and science–led sectors of industrial production (which necessitate location near to centres of research and development expertise in the USA and Europe). This means that Japanese firms are reconsidering the strategy and structure of their subsidiaries in the UK. Standardized mass production will only survive in the UK as long as costs can be pushed further down and productivity increased, both of which are difficult conditions to meet given possibilities elsewhere in the world for cheap mass production. The growing area of investment will be in science–based manufacturing, though here the UK will be competing against the USA and Germany for Japanese investment. Here, however, the organizational and management characteristics of Japanese subsidiaries will make the necessary connections with local managers and local networks of expertise difficult to achieve. Thus Japanese subsidiaries in the UK are in a period of prolonged uncertainty about their role in the future. These changes open up the necessity for a new agenda of research which goes beyond the Japanization approach and is concerned with the organization and management of Japanese multinationals in an era of global competition.     

Capacity Investment under Demand Uncertainty: The Role of Imports in the U.S. Cement Industry

Demand uncertainty is thought to influence irreversible capacity decisions. Suppose that local demand can be sourced from domestic (rigid) production or from (flexible) imports. This paper shows that the optimal domestic capacity is either increasing or decreasing with demand uncertainty, depending on the relative level of the costs of domestic production and imports. We test this relationship with data from the U.S. cement industry, in which the difference in marginal cost between domestic production and imports varies across local U.S. markets because cement is costly to transport over land. Industry data for 1999 to 2010 are consistent with the predictions of the model. The introduction of two technologies to the production set—one rigid and one flexible—is crucial to understanding the relationship between capacity choice and uncertainty in this industry because there is no relationship between these two variables in aggregated U.S. data. Our analysis reveals that the relationship is negative in coastal districts, and significantly more positive in landlocked districts.     

A comparison of the roles and responsibilities of manufacturing engineers in Japan and the United States

The manufacturing engineering work in nine Japanese firms is structured by a horizontal division of labor between manufacturing design engineers and production process engineers, in contrast to a vertical division of labor between manufacturing engineers and technicians in three American firms. The production process engineers in the Japanese firms link manufacturing engineering processes closely with production processes, whereas less coordination between the two processes occurs in the American firms. Regarding product design, manufacturing engineering, and production processes in the Japanese firms, employees engaged in downstream processes are more heavily involved with work concerned with upstream processes than in the American firms.     

THE VERY RAPID INCREASE OF JAPANESE TOURISTS ABROAD AND THE ROLE OF NATIONAL WEALTH

The strong performance of the Japanese economy, rising stock and land prices in Japan, as well as the strong yen, have prompted Japanese to travel abroad in ever increasing numbers in recent years. Despite several obstacles against growth, such as limited vacation time for employees of Japanese corporations, relatively expensive airline tickets, capacity limitations of international airports in Japan, booming resort development in Japan itself, and imposed constraints on Japanese direct investment abroad, Japanese travelers abroad, the majority of whom are tourists, increased from less than five million in 1985 to almost 10 million in 1989. The traditional demand function based on income and price may not explain all of the growth of Japanese overseas tourism, since some of the increase in Japanese travelers may stem from increases in expected future income based on increased wealth. This wealth effect hypothesis is tested using a log-linear regression model. It is found that wealth is a better predictor of overseas tourism levels than income. The effect of wealth increases on overseas tourism is also found to have a lag time of about one year. For this reason, it is proposed that the slowing in the Japanese economy this year will negatively impact Japanese overseas tourism next year.     

美国振兴先进制造业的政策措施及启示

从20世纪70年代开始,美国制造业的大批量生产模式开始走下坡路。日本经济的兴起,以丰田汽车为代表的日本汽车工业新的生产和管理模式的成功,向世界表明大批量生产的威力已到了尽头。为振兴先进制造业,美国分别从技术、财政、信息网络、教育、企业运作模式、企业联盟等方面制定了一系列政策与计划,对其进行支持。美国所采取的这些政策措施,对于我国在“十一五”规划中如何更有效促进先进制造业的发展,具有重要的启示。     

广东高职院校商务日语专业教学改革初探

近年来,日资企业对粤投资力度加大,人才市场对商务日语人才的需求呈不断上升趋势。面对这一新形势,我省各类高校特别是高职院校增设商务日语专业以适应当今社会的需要。但商务日语专业在发展与运行中存在许多不尽如人意之处,其明显的结果表现为所培养的人才还比较缺乏市场的认同与接纳,因此本文从高职院校商务日语专业教学改革进行探讨,提出相应的对策。     

Aggregate vs. disaggregate data analysis—a paradox in the estimation of a money demand function of Japan under the low interest rate policy

We use Japanese aggregate and disaggregate money demand data to show that conflicting inferences can arise. The aggregate data appears to support the contention that there was no stable money demand function. The disaggregate data shows that there was a stable money demand function. Neither was there any indication of the presence of a liquidity trap. Possible sources of discrepancy are explored and the diametrically opposite results between the aggregate and disaggregate analysis are attributed to the neglected heterogeneity among micro units. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a cointegrating relation among aggregate variables when heterogeneous cointegration relations among micro units exist. We also conduct simulation analysis to show that when such conditions are violated, it is possible to observe stable micro relations, but unit root phenomena among macro variables. Moreover, the prediction of aggregate outcomes, using aggregate data, is less accurate than the prediction based on micro equations, and policy evaluation based on aggregate data ignoring heterogeneity in micro units can be grossly misleading. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

中国企业对日并购策略研究

中国企业对日并购的增加体现出了对核心技术的强烈需求。对日并购是中国企业变大变强的一种成长战略,却不是一件易事,它是一个系统工程,牵涉的要素要比国内的企业并购复杂得多。中国企业对日并购要充分做好并购前的准备工作,加强自我保护,在股权完成交割或资产过户完成后要重点做好文化整合、人事整合、技术整合、营销整合四方面的工作。