Fukunari Kimura: The paper by Kodama and Inui is an important one for both academics and policymakers in that it provides a precious holistic view on the impact of globalizing corporate activities on domestic employment at the establishment level in Japan.
As firms have conducted outward foreign direct investment (FDI) and have increasingly globalized their activities, public concern on possible de-industrialization and job losses at home has naturally been enhanced in developed countries (DCs). It is true that DCs lose their comparative advantage in labor-intensive industries or production processes over time and such industries/activities eventually shift from DCs to less developed countries (LDCs). Such a shift of production does not immediately mean a job loss at home, however, because international production networks (Ando and Kimura 2005) or the second unbundling (Baldwin 2011) may expand the entirety of activities of corporate firms and allow them to set up the...