Do Japanese consumers care about sustainable fisheries? Evidence from an auction of ecolabelled seafood

This paper investigates Japanese consumers' willingness to pay for Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) ecolabelled seafood using a sealed bid, second price auction. Participants in an experiment in Tokyo were provided varying degrees of information about the status of world and Japanese fisheries and the MSC program in sequential rounds of bidding on ecolabelled and nonlabelled salmon products. A random‐effects tobit regression shows that there is a statistically significant premium of about 20 per cent for MSC‐ecolabelled salmon over nonlabelled salmon when consumers are provided information on both the status of global fish stocks and the purpose of the MSC program. This premium arises from a combination of an increased willingness to pay for labelled products and a decreased willingness to pay for unlabelled products. However, in the absence of experimenter‐provided information, or when provided information about the purpose of the MSC program alone without concurrent information about the need for the MSC program, there is no statistically significant premium.     

The proposal and validity of the Customer Science Dual System--The key to corporate management innovation

A future successful global marketer must develop an excellent quality marketing system that impresses users and continuously provides excellent, quality products in a timely manner through corporate management. In this study, the authors proposed the Customer Science Dual System, CS-TMNS ＆ CS-SDSM. For the purpose of innovating strategic product development systems so called Customer Value Creative System, the Total Marketing Network System, CS-TMNS is established. In addition, for intelligent utilization of the established CS-TMNS, statistical science is incorporated so as to create the Strategic Designing Support Methods, CS-SDSM, as a new approach to the creation of wants that are vital to product planning and designing. Concretely, the author will also introduce the effectiveness of this system that reflects latent customer needs through scientific marketing application examples via Automobile Design Profile for the Younger Generation.     

Entry of Small and Medium Enterprises and Economic Dynamism in Japan

In examining the evolution of small and medium enterprises in Japan in the postwar period, this paper shows that entry rates for new firms have declined sharply in the last quarter century or so, a trend observed across most sectors of the economy as well as across most firm-size categories. To explain this pattern, the paper investigates the determinants of entry in Japan. Among other factors, it finds that cost disadvantages owing to small scale and the shortage of technical resources are significant deterrents to entry. It also finds that the availability of government-directed credit deters entry which suggests that, in their current form, such credit programs protect incumbents. Among positive factors, it finds that subcontracting opportunities promote entry which suggests that the subcontracting system in Japan is open to newcomers and helps give them a foothold in the economy.     

Empirical study on the determinants of CO2 emissions: evidence from OECD countries

This article empirically investigates the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) for CO₂ emissions in the cases of 11 OECD countries by taking into account the role of nuclear energy in electricity production. The autoregressive distributed lag approach to cointegration is employed as the estimation method. Our results indicate that energy consumption has a positive impact on CO₂ emissions in most countries in the study. However, the impact of trade is not statistically significant. The results provide evidence for the role of nuclear power in reducing CO₂ emissions only in some countries. Additionally, although the estimated long-run coefficients of income and its square satisfy the EKC hypothesis in Finland, Japan, Korea and Spain, only Finland's EKC turning point is inside the sample period of the study, providing poor evidence in support of the EKC hypothesis.     

The moral–emotional foundations of political discourse: a comparative analysis of the speech records of the U.S. and the Japanese legislatures

There is a growing body of research that focuses on the supposedly close association between an individual’s moral–emotional behavior and his/her political ideology. A prominent example is Haidt’s “moral psychology,” which claims that political liberals and conservatives draw on mutually different sets of moral foundations. However, this and other arguments, which have mostly been advanced in the social context of the United States, lack a comparative perspective. In this study, we examine these arguments in broader spatio-temporal settings by way of a comparative analysis of public deliberations in the U.S. and Japanese legislatures. More specifically, with the help of well-established moral- and emotional-word dictionaries, and employing advanced computational techniques for systematic data collection, we analyze a large volume of speech data that records floor debates over decades in the U.S. Congress and the Japanese Diet to derive longitudinal moral–emotional dynamics. We then use multilevel modeling to regress the derived moral–emotional patterns of legislative deliberations in each country on various covariates to locate possible drivers of these patterns. The results of these analyses reveal more qualified relationships between a moral–emotional framework and political ideology than preceding arguments have suggested, casting serious doubt on the widespread tendency in the literature to quickly rely on an ideological explanation. The findings suggest the need for a more comprehensive approach to handling moral–emotional phenomena in political science.