Basic Survey News Today

One hotel chain in Japan has decided the only way to deal with a severe labor shortage is to double salaries to unprecedented levels.

Offshoring is a controversial aspect of globalisation, and its impact on source country welfare remains ambiguous. This column analyses the impacts of offshoring on local labour market outcomes in Japan. It finds that offshoring exposure led to higher local employment, and particularly for non-offshoring firms. Furthermore, offshoring helped mitigate the negative effects of

Participation in global value chains is commonly seen as an important driver of productivity growth. This column uses Japanese firm-level data to estimate the productivity-enhancing impacts of participation. On average, firms that form part of global value chains are found to exhibit higher productivity than non-participating firms. In addition, longer partitipation in

The dollar, the yen, or the renminbi? Invoicing currency choices by Japanese overseas subsidiaries For ITO Takatoshis full bio, For KOIBUCHI Satoshis full bio, For SATO Kiyotakas full bio, For SHIMIZU Junkos full bio, For YOSHIMI Taiyos full bio, The currency a firm chooses to invoice in reveals lessons on the prominence of that currency in the international sphere. This column presents survey data from Japanese overseas subsidiaries, highlighting how the use of Asian currencies has been growin...

Takatoshi Ito, Satoshi Koibuchi, Kiyotaka Sato, Junko Shimizu Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, Japanese firms’ profits have fluctuated with volatile exchange rate movements. From the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, the yen appreciated steadily, especially after the Plaza Accord in 1985. Japanese exporting firms have had to cope with large fluctuations within a yen appreciation trend. They have adopted various defensive measures. The use of financial instruments such as fo...

Alan Manning, Barbara Petrongolo The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic this year has led to a surge in teleworking and caused renewed interest in studying the importance of commuting patterns for geographical labour markets. Geographical labour markets are usually denoted as commuting zones, and many economic phenomena are studied at the commuting zone level. An important aspect of a commuting zones are commuting patterns, which are determined by travel costs and time for workers commuting fro...