Japan and the World Economy最新文献

Although the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on business and market performance has been getting attention in China, its influence on innovation outcomes has not been fully investigated. This study utilises patent information and CSR measurements from Orbis and Refinitiv, respectively, and empirically investigates the determinants of corporate innovation, focusing specifically on the influence of CSR. We find a positive relationship between CSR and innovation outcomes, namely patent applications and patents granted, which are also found in developed countries. Furthermore, our findings provide new insights into inconclusive factors such as the impact of Chinese economic policies or government ties on innovation performance. In particular, we find that government-owned firms no longer have a relative advantage in innovation.

In this study, I estimate the degree of competition in the Japanese loan market using a new empirical industrial organization method. With it, I conduct a long-term analysis of more than 40 years that includes the effect of financial deregulation prior to 2000. The model adopts an appropriate identification strategy in the estimation by introducing a rotation term to the demand function. This study also has an examination of the mechanism behind the long-term development of competition to test the validity of two hypotheses: the efficient structure hypothesis and the market power hypothesis. The findings are as follows: (1) The Japanese loan market was the least competitive around 1980, and competition has intensified since then. (2) After 2000, competition has generally increased, especially among large city banks with a nationwide presence. (3) The correlation analyses between market concentration, degree of competition, and cost efficiency indicate that the results are consistent with the efficient structure hypothesis except for the period around 2000. In contrast, the results are consistent with the market power hypothesis in the 1990s, but become inconsistent thereafter.

We investigate the distributional and welfare impacts when commercial and industrial (C&I) electricity end users face a dynamic pricing structure as opposed to a constant volumetric price with demand charge on individual users’ peak usage. While demand charge does not necessarily reduce the system-wide peak, it often constitutes a large share of C&I users’ payments. Hourly electricity consumption data for C&I users on O‘ahu, Hawai‘i, reveal that the fixed cost recovery associated with removing demand charge has both significant distributional impacts and considerable efficiency gains. Moreover, the rate reform can be regressive or progressive depending on how the fixed charge is allocated across users.

This study explores the role of storage systems in reducing the variability of renewable power, focusing on pumped hydropower storage (PHS) systems. We regress the hourly storage by PHS on the hourly solar power generation to estimate the average amount of solar power generation stored by PHS systems. We adopt an instrumental variable approach to mitigate any endogeneity concerns, in which a weighted sunshine duration serves as the instrument for solar power generation. Our estimation results show that PHS systems alleviate the intermittency of solar power generation: an additional 1 MWh of solar power generation corresponds to an additional 0.249 MWh of storage by PHS systems. The relationship between PHS and solar power is more pronounced when the demand is relatively low and solar power generation is large. Inter-regional transmission grids also respond to an increase in solar power generation but to a lesser extent than PHS systems. Based on the estimated coefficients in the empirical analysis, we quantified the value of the existing PHS systems as storage systems that mitigated intermittent solar power generation. The estimated social benefit of avoiding curtailment is 180–280 million yen for a 10 MW scale plant, accounting for 7.7–11.7% of the cost of constructing a new PHS system. The result highlights the importance of effectively utilizing the current PHS capacity.

This paper empirically investigates the contributory factors to forced outage declarations of power plants through a survival analysis model with recurrent events. Using plant-level data in the Philippines, we find that higher reserve margins, higher share capacity (a measure of concentration), and the number of planned outages and days since the last maintenance (preventive maintenance indicators) reduce the risk of forced outages. On the other hand, an increase in the use rate (a measure of the intensity of power plant utilization) and geothermal, solar, and biodiesel plants correlate positively to more forced outages. Focusing on episodes where outages were disproportionately higher in the past decade— we find that thinning reserve margin correlates significantly to forced outage incidence. We also find that a higher share of a power firm’s capacity to the system’s total dependable capacity contributes to lowering the risk of forced outages.

Feed-in tariff (FIT) is an important worldwide initiative to encourage renewable electricity technologies. Under the Japanese FIT system, households with solar panels decide the amount of both self-consumption and sales to the power company. By analyzing the household self-consumption and sales behaviors of solar-generated electricity obtained from the Ministry of the Environment of Japan, we examine (1) whether the rate of increase in electricity sales by households is higher or lower than the rate of increase in solar power generation and (2) whether self-consumption and sales behaviors of solar-generated electricity differ among households with different sales prices. The results show that the rate of increase in electricity sales is lower than that in solar electricity generation. This suggests that households increase their self-consumption as solar power generation increases. However, as the rate of increase in self-consumption is relatively low, solar-generated electricity is considered as a necessary good. Furthermore, we find that higher sales prices induce households to reduce their self-consumption and increase solar electricity sales to power companies.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work suddenly attracted attention. This paper focuses on inter-firm relations, as the costs and benefits of introducing remote work are likely to differ depending on the firms’ relationships with other firms. We combine our unique survey on the responses of Japanese manufacturers or wholesalers to the COVID-19 pandemic with transaction relation data. We find that firms sourcing from more suppliers before the pandemic are significantly more likely to adopt remote work during the pandemic even after controlling for firm size. Wholesalers selling to more customers appear to be less likely to shift to remote work.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the simulated effects of carbon pricing on South Korea's industrial sector by using carbon pricing scenarios. The estimation results show that carbon taxation is highly effective to reduce carbon emissions of industrial sector only when the changes of energy mix take place. If the energy mix remain unchanged, the level of carbon tax should be higher than 60,000 Korean won (USD 54.55) to achieve the NDC goal of 14 % emissions reduction in industrial sector. In addition, the reduction in industrial production due to the carbon tax is estimated to be relatively small when substitution between energy and other production factors is possible. This paper proposes policies that can induce changes in the energy mix are very necessary in order to decarbonize and strengthen the competitiveness of industrial sector.

Transitioning to a low-carbon economy can take various forms, one of which is structural change, particularly tertiarization. When the economic structure shifts from being dominated by sectors that rely heavily on fossil fuels to one that does not, the economy can become less carbon-intensive. The relocation of Indonesia's capital city from Jakarta to East Kalimantan is an example of how a traditionally resource-intensive regional economy may respond to the sudden emergence of a large-scale service sector, in this case, the government sector. This paper investigates how the capital city relocation may affect the destination region's economic structure using an inter-regional computable general equilibrium modeling. The model considers not only how different economic sectors are interconnected but also how sectors within one province are interconnected with sectors in other provinces. According to the findings, the relocation of the capital city increases the Gross Regional Domestic Product (GRDP) of the destination region (KalTim) by a massive amount (22%) while decreasing the GRDP of Jakarta (the old capital) by a moderate amount (7%). However, because the expanding sector is relatively high-skill intensive, it tends to produce skill-biased increases in real wages. As a result, the destination region (Kaltim) undergoes massive structural change as its service sector share increases by 12%, a change historically comparable in two decades. In addition, Kaltim's carbon emission intensity decreases by 18% due to this large-scale tertiarization. The analysis has demonstrated how and to what extent the relocation of Indonesia's capital city may help the province diversify from a natural resource-intensive economy to a more service-oriented and low-carbon economy.