Export Trend of the Japanese Manufacturing Industry after a World Economic Crisis: Analysis of plant data (Japanese)

Using panel data of the Census of Manufactures from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, this paper analyzes the export trend of the Japanese manufacturing industry from 2008-2010. After classifying plants into four categories—(i) non-exporter, (ii) export entry, (iii) export exit, (iv) continuing exporter—based on the record of exporting from 2008-2010, we decomposed the decrease of Japanese manufacturing export value into extensive margin (contribution by (ii) and (iii)) and intensive margin (contribution by (iv)). Exports by the Japanese manufacturing industry decreased by 14.41% during the two-year period. Our research revealed that the intensive margin contributed dominantly to the decrease (-16.20 percentage points) relative to the extensive margin (1.78 percentage points), on one hand, and the number of plants exiting from export markets reached a certain size—1,472—compared to the number of continuing exporters, 6,560, on the other hand. Furthermore, our estimation of the exporting probability using panel data of exporting plants in 2008 clarified that plants' internal factors such as productivity, plant size, and capital labor ratio have a significant effect on the exporting probability even among exporting plants with relatively high-level performance.