Skills and changing comparative advantage: The case of JapanJapan and the World Economy, 2013, vol. 28, issue C, 33-40 Abstract: Is the skill gap of net exports widening? This question is nontrivial for many industrial countries because, with the rapid growth of emerging countries, human capital is considered one of the most important sources of comparative advantage. Theoretically, however, the answer is not necessarily obvious because of changing comparative advantage. This paper attempts to answer this question by extending the analysis of Wolff (2003) and by focusing on one of the largest OECD countries, Japan, for the period 1980–2005. The results indicate that the answer to the above question may well be “no.” Although Japan is still a net exporter of skill-intensive goods, the skill gap of net exports has been narrowing since the mid-1990s, mainly as a result of the changes in the composition of trade. This implies that some OECD countries, including Japan, may have been losing their comparative advantage in skill-intensive goods in recent years. Keywords: Skills; Comparative advantage; Factor content of trade; Japan (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:japwor:v:28:y:2013:i:c:p:33-40 DOI: 10.1016/j.japwor.2013.06.004 Access Statistics for this article Japan and the World Economy is currently edited by Robert Dekle and Yasushi Hamao More articles in Japan and the World Economy from Elsevier |
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