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FUKAO, Kyoji

University Professor
Research Division of Economic Measurement and Statistics

Specialization:
Macroeconomics, Quantitative Economic History, International Economics

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Previous research

Until the 1990s, I was largely concerned with theoretical research on international capital flows, macroeconomic dynamics and multiple equilibria under imperfect information, and various other topics, which has been published in academic journals such as the Journal of Political Economy, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, etc. Since then, I have concentrated on empirical research in the three fields of historical statistics, productivity, and international economics. Examples of studies in these areas include: (1) Fukao, Ma and Yuan (2006), which directly estimated purchasing power parities for Japan, Korea, and Taiwan in the 1930s using data for that period and compared the per capita GDP of the three countries; (2) Fukao and Kwon (2006), which conducts a supply-side analysis of Japan's economic stagnation during the 1990s; and (3) studies such as Fukao, Ishido and Ito (2003), which analyze trade patterns using detailed trade data and show that intra-industry trade accompanying the vertical division of labor has increased rapidly in East Asia during the 1990s as a result of foreign direct investment (FDI), especially in the electrical machinery industry.

Current research projects

My current research concentrates primarily on three areas. The first is the measurement and the determinants of Japan's total factor productivity at the macro, industry, and firm level. I am also involved in an international project on the comparison of productivity in cooperation with researchers at various overseas universities and economic ministries. In particular, I am interested in the influence of process and product innovation on productivity, the economic effects of M&As, international comparisons of service sector productivity, the determinants of plant-level productivity, such as location and intangible assets, etc. International economics constitute the second major area in which I am conducting research. Topics include Japan's inward and outward FDI, the international division of labor in East Asia, China's economic development, etc. I am particularly interest in differences in the factor contents of traded goods classified as that same commodity but with different unit prices, the impact of inward FDI in Japan, the sustainability of China's growth, etc. Third, I am conducting historical statistical analyses on prices, trade, and regional economies. This includes, for example, the measurement of real wages from the middle ages until the present, prefectural GDP estimates from the early Meiji period onward, etc.

Keywords
total factor productivity, intangible assets, JIP database, purchasing power parity, foreign direct investment, vertical intra-industry trade, factor contents