Tadashi Ito

Using the Japanese firm/establishment-level census data, we investigate the impact of the Chinese import penetration on employment in Japan. We found negative impacts of the Chinese import penetration on total employment, especially in industries producing competing products to Chinese imports, and a positive impact of the import penetration in the industries from which firms purchase their inputs (upstream import penetration). The negative impacts are mainly driven by firms’ exit from the market while positive impacts are enjoyed by surviving firms. We did not find any significant impacts of the penetration in the industries to which firms sell their products (downstream penetration).

Many studies have investigated the impact of imports, especially those from China, on the domestic labor market. In this paper, we empirically examine the effects of not only imports from China but also those from regional trade agreement (RTA) partners on employment in Japan. To this end, we decomposed the total import penetration into the import penetration under the most favored nation (MFN) and RTA regimes. To address the endogeneity concern on our import penetration variables, we estimated our models by the instrumental variable method. As in previous studies in the literature, we found that the rise in import penetration from China significantly decreases employment in Japan. In contrast, import penetration under the RTA regime is found to have significantly positive effects on employment. The increase in imports under RTA regimes is not harmful to the domestic labor market.

This paper examines the impact of local procurement on the performance of foreign-owned firms. Using a unique survey of Japanese overseas affiliates suitable to this end, the authors show that the increase of local procurement improves Japanese affiliates' performance, but these positive effects are observed only in the case of procuring inputs from other Japanese affiliates in their host country, not in the case of procurement from indigenous firms.

This paper presents the novel finding that, in contrast to what the previous literature has shown, two-way intra-industry trade (IIT) in product-country pairs, when looked from a dynamic perspective, is very unstable by using disaggregated trade data of OECD countries. Many products frequently switch among two-way, one-way and zero trade over time. To measure the stability of two-way trade, we propose a measure that we refer to as the "IIT stability index". Our estimation results using the proposed measure show that two-way trade involving markets of different sizes and long distance are likely to be unstable and primary products are more unstable than manufactured products. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.