Tsutomu Miyagawa

コロナ禍を経た日本で、デジタル化の遅れを取り戻す動きが盛んになっている。しかし、統計データの制約から IT 投資とそれに伴う人材育成や組織改革を組み合わせた包括的なデジタル化に関する定量的な分析は少ない。一方で従来型の投資ではないクラウド・サービスや生成AIなどの新たな情報サービスの利用形態も現れている。そこで本稿では、統計データの制約の下で、生産に寄与する IT 資産及び IT サービスの計測に関する新たなアプローチを試みる。またデジタル化を政府が推進する背景には、スピルオーヴァー効果の存在があるが、本稿では公的部門と情報サービス産業からのスピルオーヴァー効果に焦点をあてた推計を行う。推計の結果、これらの産業からのスピルオーヴァー効果が確認されたことから、もしスピルオーヴァー効果を重視するのであれば、政府の支援は情報サービス産業を中心にした方が望ましいと考えられる。

The economic impact of information and communications technology (ICT) investment is visible only with a long time-lag, particularly in the case of employment. There are two contrasting effects of ICT investment on employment: the complementarity relationships between capital and higher skills and the substitutability relationships between capital and lower skills and between the ICT capital intensity and wage rate of unskilled workers. The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical evidence on the impact of the skill-biased technical change associated with ICT investment on labor demand in Japan and Korea. Our estimates of the effect of ICT intensity on the wage share based on Japanese and Korean data are generally consistent with the estimates obtained by O'Mahony et al. (2008) in the sense that we find capital-skill complementarity and technology-skill substitutability during the period 1995-2015.

Bloom and Van Reenen (Quarterly Journal of Economics 122:1351-1408, 2007) show that differences in management practices are related to productivity differences at the firm level. In this paper we conducted a similar interview surveys on management practices in Japanese and Korean firms in 2008 and 2012. We find that overall management scores as an average of organizational and human resource management scores in Japan are higher than those in Korea. However, the second survey shows that the gap in management scores between two countries has shrunken over time. In addition, average management quality in Korean large firms has surpassed that in Japanese large firms, which are consistent with the literature comparing big businesses in Korea and Japan. This study also compares additional aspects of the management style, such as speed in decision-making and the role of various communication channels, which are not done in the previous literatures.

Following Corrado et al. (Review of Income and Wealth 55:658–660, 2009), we measure intangible assets at the listed firm level in Japan. Compared to the conventional Tobin’s Q, the revised Q including intangibles is almost 1 on average, as suggested by Hall (Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1:73–118, 2000 and American Economic Review 91:1185–1202, 2001). The standard deviation of the revised Q is smaller than that of the conventional Q. Estimation results based on Bond and Cummins (Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1:61–124, 2000) show that greater intangible assets increase firm value. In particular, in the IT industries, on average Tobin’s Q is higher than that in the non-IT industries, and the stock market reflects the value of intangibles in the IT industries. These results suggest that the government should adopt policies that promote investment, including intangibles in the IT industries, and change in industry structure in Japan.

In this paper we examine empirically the effect of market competition on firm productivity improvements using data drawn from the Japanese manufacturing sector. We find that a non-linear relationship between competition and productivity growth induced by R&D activity as suggested by Aghion et al. (2005) holds for Japanese manufacturing firms. We also SLOW that greater market competition widens technology differences across firms, and firms facing more intense competition are more productive than other firms. Our empirical results imply that productivity improvement through R&D activity depends on not only a competitive environment but also technological differences between firms. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.