Published papers

We conducted a standard gravity exercise using worldwide disaggregated trade data to shed light on the influence of digital technologies on network trade. We found that growing investment in industrial robots in relatively lagging economies, together with imported digitally deliverable services, is enhancing bilateral network trade flows in East Asia, but not necessarily in other parts of the world. This suggests that exploring complementarities between machines and human resources in production blocks supported by better service-link connectivity may allow newly developed economies to retain and expand the international division of labor.

Unlike studies that analyze the impact of robotics technology on overall employment at the industry or firm level, this study investigated cross-division employment adjustment within a firm in an industry with greater diffusion and penetration of robotics technology. By examining changes in the composition of employment, we measured job creation and destruction at the division level and explored whether robotics technology, as a leading example of automation, not only displaces workers but also introduces new jobs in favor of labor. We made use of unique, division-level employment data for Japan's manufacturing firms, together with industry-level data on the installation of industrial robots. We found that industry-level adoption of robots positively affects the firm-level job creation rate and the job destruction rate. Because the magnitude of the impact is larger for job destruction, robot adoption has an overall negative impact on firms’ net employment growth. Our findings suggest that the labor displacement effect of robotics technology and the emergence of new jobs due to technological change coexist even at the firm level.

This paper examines the impact of advanced technology and import penetration on changes in employment positions and income, as well as the possibility that workers become unemployed due to such technological progress. Two proxies of advanced technology are used, ICT and the intensity of robot usage. The analysis considers changes in employment status and income, together with workers’ industrial adjustments in investigating the impact of technological advancements and imports, which are delineated into raw materials, capital goods and final products. The results show that in Thailand, the impact of advanced technology in pushing workers out of the job market is limited. Instead, it tends to affect the reallocation of workers between skilled and unskilled positions. The results vary among workers’ industrial destinations and proxies of technology. Skill upgrading is likely to occur more when workers stay or move within manufacturing sectors, while ICT usage tends to generate more favourable outcomes than robot adoption. Workers in comparatively capital-intensive industries, including the automotive and plastics and rubber sectors, tend to receive greater benefits from technological growth. Our results highlight a diminished negative impact resulting from imports, particularly those of capital and final goods, in comparison to that of technological advancements. Technology adoption and imports are likely to lower workers’ income regardless of their industrial destinations and proxies of technology.

We examine whether and how a country's centrality in global value chains (GVCs) is dependent upon the extent to which its regulatory regime differs from the global norm, using country and sector-level data from OECD and UNCTAD. We find that the more similar a country's regulatory regime is to global standards the more likely the country is to play a dominant role in GVCs. Our findings suggest that a country could enhance its centrality in GVCs by harmonising a set of technical regulations to the global standards.

Abstract This study examines the welfare implications of allowing border carbon adjustments (BCAs) in a globalized economy characterized by international trade and cross-border pollution (CBP). The model predicts that adopting BCAs is a weakly dominant strategy and global welfare is maximized when at least one country adopts BCAs in the presence of CBP, such as global warming. This is because adopting BCAs induces other countries to raise their domestic emission tax rates without concerns such as the excessive shrinkage of domestic production and aggravation of CBP.

In this paper, we develop the additional compliance requirement indicator (ACRI) to quantify the extra regulatory requirements that an exporter may face when serving the foreign country's market. The higher the value of ACRI, the greater the difference between the sets of technical measures in the destination and origin countries. Employing the ACRI, we estimate the impact on trade of regulatory burdens via product-level bilateral gravity equations. We find a significant negative impact of regulatory burdens on bilateral trade for a full sample, but the estimated trade effects vary across sectors and depend on the development levels of the trading countries.

It is widely known that countries export less to destination countries with greater regulatory burdens. Using finely disaggregated product-level bilateral trade value and quantity data for 98 countries, together with a new data set of detailed information on technical regulations, we answer the following question: If a country faces a greater regulatory burden in a particular destination market, is that country more likely to export a narrower set of goods (the extensive margin) and lower quantities of each good at a higher price (the intensive margin)? We find that beyond the overall trade-diminishing effect, regulatory burdens adversely affect the extensive margin of trade. With respect to the intensive margin, regulatory burdens negatively affect the quantity margin but positively affect the price margin. As the negative effect on the quantity margin is relatively larger in magnitude than the positive effect on the price margin, the result is a negative net impact on the intensive margin.

Abstract This paper investigates the impacts of COVID-19 on international production networks in machinery sectors by shedding light on negative supply shocks, negative demand shocks, and positive demand shocks. Specifically, we examined changes in trade in the trade-fall periods amid COVID-19 in 2020 using Japan's machinery trade at the most disaggregated level and decomposed them into two intensive margins (i.e., the quantity effect and the price effect) and two extensive margins (i.e., the entry effect and the exit effect). Our empirical results show that trade relationships for parts and components were robust even amid COVID-19 and that international production networks in machinery sectors were almost intact. They also demonstrate that COVID-19 brought positive demand shocks for specific products with special demand due to its nature in addition to negative supply shocks and negative demand shocks, which partially explains heterogeneous effects not only among sectors but also among products in the same sector. As of October 2020, Japan's machinery trade seems to have mostly recovered.

Abstract The spatial unbundling of parts production and assembly currently characterizes globalization, leading to the worldwide dispersion of pollution. We consider socially optimal (cooperative) environmental taxes in a two-country model of global value chains in which the location of both parts and assembly can differ. When unbundling costs are so high that parts and assembly must colocate in the pre-globalized world, pollution is spatially concentrated, and harmonizing environmental taxes maximizes global welfare. In contrast, with low unbundling costs triggering the dispersion of parts and thus pollution throughout the world as today, harmonization fails to maximize global welfare. Similar results hold when the two countries non-cooperatively choose their environmental taxes.