研究者詳細 - 野村　浩二

総説・解説等 - 野村　浩二

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"The evolving role of the service sector" (Reading Productivity and Economic Trends)

Eunice Lau and Koji Nomura

APO News （Asian Productivity Organization） 2008年11月

記事・総説・解説・論説等（その他）, 共著

Traditionally, technological advances tend to favor manufacturing more than services, resulting in the former sector being the engine of productivity growth in an economy. Services, in contrast, have been perceived as the technologically stagnant sector. If its relative claim on resources in the economy is rising, overall productivity growth will be dragged down to the rate prevailing in the stagnant sector. When this so-called Baumol's disease takes root, economic growth is doomed to decline.
In recent years, however, a cure for Baumol's disease has started surfacing in empirical evidence, which points to the emerging capability of some service industries to capitalize on information and communication technologies (ICT) and achieve productivity growth. J.E. Triplett and B.P. Bosworth (FRBNY Economic Policy Review, September 2003) declared that, "Baumol's disease has been cured." This assertion was based on their findings that in the USA, labor productivity growth in the service industry equaled the economywide average in the latter half of the 1990s, driven by an unprecedented surge in total factor productivity growth. In short, services are no longer the sick industries in terms of productivity growth.
The pervasive nature of ICT has meant that its impact is not reserved for manufacturing but also can transform service industries. ICT is also seen as a disruptive technology, productivity assimilation of which often requires a major overhaul of business practices. The role of ICT in service industries is twofold. First, it provides an enabling technological platform to create and launch new service products. As ICT fundamentally improves the efficiency of data and information processing, its effective exploitation not only leads to an expansion of product possibilities but also creates new business formats and new industries selling service functionality. Second, by providing a cost-effective, time-efficient, borderless medium to store, present, and transmit information, ICT networks together with digitalization have helped make information and knowledge more marketable and breach the physical barrier of national boundaries. If supported by trade liberalization efforts, the international market offers these IT-using service industries new business opportunities and scope to reap economies of scale, which are unavailable to traditional services.
The service sector accounts for the biggest share of total value added in Asian countries, independent of their stage of development (Table 8, APO Productivity Databook 2008). The accompanying figure shows contributions of the service sector to labor productivity growth during 2000–2005, which were particularly prominent in India, accounting for just under 90%. At 5.8% on average per year, services were the sector with the highest labor productivity growth in India. This is consistent with the well-documented economic surge of India in the 1990s via its IT-based high-tech information services, which flourish on human rather than physical capital. By providing new ways to compete, modern ICT has allowed India to take an unusual path in economic development, bypassing a stage when manufacturing steers. Rather than being a laggard sector, service industries can be a leading sector driving productivity growth and development if ICT can be successfully assimilated and exploited.

"The process of technology assimilation" (Reading Productivity and Economic Trends)

Eunice Lau and Koji Nomura

APO News （Asian Productivity Organization） 2008年10月

記事・総説・解説・論説等（その他）, 共著

Technological transfer plays a key role in economic development. Part of the technological advancement is embodied in capital goods, which can be acquired through investment. But how to master the embodied technology to yield its full productivity potential in the host country is largely tacit and requires learning by doing. This process of technology assimilation can be slow, disruptive, and costly. How successful a country can be in this respect depends on its social and technological capabilities. Empirically, assimilation rates vary across countries, resulting in diverse development experience and outcomes.
As mentioned previously in this column, the Asian miracle was credited largely to input accumulation rather than to total factor productivity growth. Focusing on level comparisons of Asian and US manufacturing for the period 1963–1997, Marcel P. Timmer (Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, 2002; 16: 50–72) observed that labor productivity levels achieved by the Republic of China and Republic of Korea in 1997, even after a period of capital intensification, were lower than what the USA had achieved at similar levels of capital intensity. In other words, capital accumulation might have created the potential but was itself not a sufficient condition for performance; the same amount of capital was used more productively in the USA in the late 1980s than in the Republic of Korea and Republic of China in the 1990s. Although capital intensity was not covered in the APO Productivity Databook 2008, the accompanying chart shows that labor productivity at the whole economy level in the Republic of China was 79% that of the USA in 2005, whereas the Republic of Korea's in 2005 was 85% and 55% of the US 1975 and 2005 levels, respectively.
The USA's superior assimilation ability was also apparent in comparisons with Europe. The divergent productivity performance in the latter half of the 1990s was largely attributed to the failure of Europe to reap productivity gains from ICT investments compared with the USA. Empirical evidence therefore suggests that soft investment in organizational change, managerial skills, and human capital is required to complement the accumulation effort.
Given the diminishing possibilities for further productivity improvements with a particular technology, sustained growth must involve the continual introduction of new technology, new goods, and new activities. However, the pace of the climb up the technological ladder can be too fast if insufficient time is allowed for the assimilation process and learning costs are too high to be beneficial to productivity growth. On the other hand, countries can also be stagnant in productivity growth with the existing technology when the pace of technological change is too slow and new opportunities are not created. The right balance is difficult to judge a priori, and different industry sectors even within a country can display diverse capabilities in adopting new technologies and pushing the frontier. In general, flexibility of a country in resource allocation and factor markets with a well-educated workforce will be conducive to the process.

"Setting agriculture in order—an important step toward development"(Reading Productivity and Economic Trends)

Eunice Lau and Koji Nomura

APO News （Asian Productivity Organization） 2008年09月

記事・総説・解説・論説等（その他）, 共著

Asia is a diverse region with countries at different stages of economic development. Part of this diversity is reflected in the national industrial composition. Economic data suggest that the more an economy relies on its agricultural sector, the lower its per capita GDP. Although the actual path of economic development may vary, an effective redeployment of resources from the agricultural sector appears to be an element common to a country's development outcome.
The accompanying chart shows national industrial composition of total value added in 2005 (Figure 13 in the APO Productivity Databook 2008). The share of agriculture ranged from 44.8% in Lao PDR to 1.4% in Japan. The data suggest a negative correlation between the size of the agricultural sector and the relative per capita GDP against the USA. That is, the lowest income group tends to have the largest agricultural sector, whereas the top group has the smallest.
Agricultural employment in Asia accounted for 45% of total employment in 2005, compared with 1.1% for the USA. In Asia, agriculture generally has a higher employment share than its corresponding value-added share, implying that the sector's labor productivity level lags behind that of the wider economy. In 2005, per-worker value added in agriculture was only 31% of that in the nonagricultural sector on average. Assuming other things being equal, this difference in the industrial structure alone, i.e., the relatively less productive sector having a much greater weight, explains 10–20% of Asia's 84% labor productivity shortfall against the USA.
In the context of long-term trends, this snapshot of cross-country comparisons in 2005 reflects regional progress rather than weakness. Despite the widespread variations, nearly all countries studied are making concerted efforts to shift resources from agriculture, and most experienced positive labor productivity growth between 2000 and 2005, ranging from 1.1% in Japan to 5.8% in Malaysia (Table 11 in the APO Productivity Databook 2008). The trend of a long-term relative decline of agriculture is unmistakable.
It is perhaps no coincidence that the Green Revolution and rural reforms preceded economic reforms and the subsequent takeoff in China and India in the 1980s (see for example, Sachs, J., The End of Poverty, 2005). The boost in rural income was significant when agriculture's share in total employment was around 70% in both countries in the 1970s. The subsequent emergence of high-performing new sectors (particularly manufacturing in China and IT services in India) held the key to the productive absorption of resources displaced from agriculture and spurred overall growth. By 2005, agriculture's employment share had fallen to 53.7% and 44.8% in India and China, respectively. However, the corresponding value-added share of 18.3% and 12.6% still suggests significant slack in agriculture in these two economies, despite their rapid economic growth. Underemployment, and informal production and employment, are suspected to be prevalent in agriculture in these fast-transforming Asian economies. Given the size of the sector, their impact on economic measurement could be significant.

"The role of structural shifts in productivity enhancement" (Reading Productivity and Economic Trends)

Eunice Lau and Koji Nomura

APO News （Asian Productivity Organization） 2008年08月

記事・総説・解説・論説等（その他）, 共著

Productivity gains from structural shifts could be highly significant in economic development. More specifically, it has been argued that the rapid shift of capital and labor into the "modern sector" of higher labor productivity played a pivotal role in the Asian Miracle by preventing a decline in the return on capital despite the sustained high investment ratios in these high-performing economies (see, for example, Nelson, R. and Pack, H., The Asian Miracle and Modern Growth Theory, Economic Journal, 1999; 109: 416–436).
Since the 1960s, a handful of East Asian economies, notably Singapore, the Republic of China, Hong Kong, and the Republic of Korea, have managed to set themselves off on a path of impressive growth. With their real per capita GDP growing at a pace of 4–5% per year on average, these economies outperformed other comparable developing countries in the 1960s and stand out as the only region that has managed to catch up to the living standards of the advanced countries. The accompanying figure (Figure 5 in the APO Productivity Databook 2008) shows how these economies rapidly closed the per capita income gap with the USA from 1975, against the background of little progress made by the region as a whole. Because of its potential policy significance, what has been the recipe for the Asian Miracle has been a subject of vigorous academic debate.
Among other views, narrowing the "idea gap" was put forward as an explanation by Paul Romer (Idea Gaps and Object Gaps in Economic Development, Journal of Monetary Economics, 1993; 32: 543–573). He argued that underlying the success of the East Asian economies was their ability to adopt existing technologies from the advanced economies. If true, this represented a less costly approach to economic development than the accumulation view whereby the road to prosperity is through savings and investment, in other words, forgone current consumption, which many poor countries cannot easily afford.
Empirical evidence, however, has lent little support for this view. East Asia's rapid growth has been found to be largely driven by factor accumulation, with total factor productivity (TFP) growth accounting for only one-fourth of the region's growth in labor productivity between 1960 and 1994 (Collins, S. and Bosworth, B., Economic Growth in East Asia: Accumulation versus Assimilation, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 1996; 2: 135–203). The main lessons from East Asia's success therefore are not about which policies best promote TFP growth. Rather, the focus should be on how to achieve and sustain high rates of savings and investment, defying the law of diminishing returns.
With an investment ratio of over 20% of GDP, Nelson and Pack (1999) argued that the success of the fast-growing Asian economies lay in their extraordinary ability to absorb and assimilate technologies superior to their own at a rapid pace sustained over a long period without slowing. This process involved uncertainty and economic risk in an essential way. To sow the seeds of success, a favorable policy environment was first required to nurture learning, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Subsequently, it was the shift of resources into the more modern, capital-intensive technologies through aggressive entrepreneurship and progressive learning that held the key to sustaining high rates of return on capital and in turn investment, which drove growth. In other words, the observed dramatic shift in the product mix and firm size in these Asian economies should be seen as an integral part of their success story which ran far deeper than simply factor accumulation.

"Why labor productivity matters" (Reading Productivity and Economic Trends)

Eunice Lau and Koji Nomura

APO News （Asian Productivity Organization） 2008年07月

記事・総説・解説・論説等（その他）, 共著

"For the fact is that the key both to long-term economic growth and to sustained differences in economic performance between countries seems to be the ability to get more for less—to have output grow faster than input." Paul Krugman (International Affairs, 1995; 71(4): 717–732)Productivity is one of the main economic performance indicators that government policymakers often monitor. In simple terms, productivity measures units of output per unit of input. As resource constraints are prevalent in all economies in one form or another, whatever the income level, the capability of an economy to drive productivity growth, i.e., output growing faster than input, is seen as cardinal for ensuring future prosperity.In 2005, GDP per capita (adjusted for purchasing power parity [PPP]) of APO member countries as a whole was only around 15% of that of the USA. Despite rapid economic growth of the group in recent years, the gap persists. The accompanying chart shows that for most APO countries, the substantial per-capita GDP gaps with the USA are predominantly explained by their relatively poor labor productivity performance. This is why identifying the sources of labor productivity growth is crucial to a country's development efforts.There are different techniques for productivity analysis. The APO Productivity Databook uses the growth accounting framework, the international standard for compiling productivity estimates. In this approach, economic growth is decomposed into contributions of input growth and total factor productivity (TFP) growth. Within the same framework, labor productivity growth can be traced back to its sources in capital deepening, improvement in labor quality, and TFP growth. Although full analysis of these sources was not performed in the Databook 2008 (the current plan is that sources of productivity growth will be analyzed at least for some countries in Databook 2009) as theoretically established channels of labor productivity growth, they highlight areas where potential policy levers could be applied to raise labor productivity.Another perspective is the industry origins of productivity growth, which offer insight into the dynamics of an economy and the sectors contributing most to the productivity drive. Furthermore, productivity growth for the whole economy can be decomposed into the intrasectoral effect (productivity gains within the industry sectors) and the intersectoral effect (the change in the resource allocation of production). The latter is positive when high-performance industry is growing relative to other sectors in the economy.Empirical evidence of the "Asian Miracle" has suggested that input growth (especially capital accumulation) was behind the success story of Asian Tigers, i.e., Hong Kong, Singapore, Republic of Korea, and Republic of China, that experienced more than a four-fold increase in per capita income over the 35-year period from the mid-1960s. Labor productivity growth was largely explained by capital deepening with TFP growth playing a surprisingly small role in its success. The lessons to be learned are therefore why those countries can mobilize input better than other countries and how they can achieve and sustain high rates of saving and investment. Nelson and Pack (Economic Journal, 1999; 109(457): 416–436) highlighted that among other factors, the possibility to shift into highly productive sectors is a crucial element of this productive assimilation of factor inputs.

"International comparisons of productivity: a panoramic view for decision making" (Reading Productivity and Economic Trends)

Eunice Lau and Koji Nomura

APO News （Asian Productivity Organization） 2008年06月

記事・総説・解説・論説等（その他）, 共著

We are faced with economic decisions every day, whether as consumers, workers, entrepreneurs, or government policymakers. Generally, the better the information we have, the better are our decisions and in turn their outcomes. We may be well aware of our immediate surroundings but a panoramic view often requires some research effort. When we broaden our view, we may discover options and possibilities that we did not even know existed, relevant lessons to be learned from others' experience of our actions or inaction, and benchmark performances to aspire to.
As a key indicator of economic performance, productivity analysis is useful in focusing on issues at hand. In particular, when a country is catching up with the world leaders in GDP per capita, significant productivity growth is an essential element in the process. A good understanding of the key drivers and dynamics of productivity growth is therefore beneficial to a country's development efforts.
Some APO member countries may already have their own programs of productivity analysis, but such programs may not sufficiently take into account the regional and global contexts. This is a gap that the APO Productivity Databook seeks to fill to complement national programs. Through international comparisons, widespread global or regional economic trends can be distinguished from factors unique to individual economies, and benchmark performances can be identified and analyzed to focus on potential adaptations. In this manner, international comparisons highlight the ways countries are able to learn from and cooperate with each other.
In the APO Productivity Databook 2008, a new analytical framework was developed to enable cross-country comparisons for the first time in this series. Furthermore, to provide a more complete regional and global perspective, the economic performances of APO member countries were compared with those of the People's Republic of China, USA, and EU15 for reference. Countries are ranked according to their GDP and per capita GDP. To reflect their diversity, countries covered in the publication were divided into groups based on relative per capita GDP and how fast they were catching up with the USA, the world leader. Regional economic growth was dissected into country origins. Changes in per capita GDP were traced back to the causal components, i.e., labor productivity and the labor utilization rate. To understand further the dynamics of an economy, we analyzed the industry origins of each country's economic growth and labor productivity.
This monthly column in the APO News will present the findings from the analyses contained in the APO Productivity Databook 2008 in bite-sized form, focusing on one specific topic each month and expanding on its implications where possible. International comparisons of productivity, however, are not a precise science but fraught with measurement difficulties and issues. Although the APO Productivity Databook 2008 represents an important milestone in APO productivity research efforts, there is still room for improvement. More specifically, the work of the APO Productivity Databook project team continues in two broad directions: 1) more thorough data investigation and harmonization to improve cross-country data comparability and in turn the quality of the results; and 2) an expanded scope of the analytical framework for completeness. Admittedly, a "perfect" data set is an unattainable dream. Nevertheless, improved knowledge of the underlying statistics should enable us to judge data limitations better and in turn to interpret the results with greater confidence. The medium-term goal is to build an APO productivity database comparable with other international databases in terms of quality, opening up the possibility for the majority of countries in the Asia-Pacific to be included in future international studies of productivity performance.

「環太平洋地域各国の生産性比較と国際競争力分析」

野村浩二、デール・ジョルゲンソン、黒田昌裕、新保一成

学術フロンティア研究成果報告書2008 （G-SEC, Keio University） 22 - 23 2008年04月

記事・総説・解説・論説等（大学・研究所紀要）, 共著

製造業の価格競争力を背景に、日本経済の躍進は近いうちに米国のper-Capita GDPあるいは労働生産性水準を凌駕するのではないか、少なからずエコノミストがその予想を抱いていたのは今から20年ほど前のことに過ぎない。20世紀のlast decade、米国はITハードウェア・ソフトウェア双方の資本深化およびその技術進歩自体による労働生産性の向上を実現し、また情報技術の産業化に成功した。現在、一国市場経済全体の対比としてみれば、日本の労働生産性は米国に比して30%ほど劣位にあると測定される。本プロジェクトは、競争力劣位の要因およびその産業起因の分析のため、国際的に比較可能な生産性データベースの構築、またその比較可能性を高めるような国民経済計算体系の検討をおこなってきた。

公開用PDF1

「周回遅れの統計精度」（経済教室）

野村浩二

『日本経済新聞』（日本経済新聞社） 2008年03月

記事・総説・解説・論説等（商業誌、新聞、ウェブメディア）, 単著

「米国市場の知らない"Made in Japan"」

野村浩二

『三田評論』（慶應義塾大学出版会） 2005年08月

記事・総説・解説・論説等（その他）, 単著

書評　藤川清史著『グローバル経済の産業連関分析』

野村浩二

『イノベーション＆IOテクニーク』（環太平洋産業連関分析学会） 1999年07月

記事・総説・解説・論説等（学術雑誌）, 単著

「日本の潜在成長力」（経済教室）

黒田昌裕, 野村浩二

『日本経済新聞』（日本経済新聞社） 1999年01月