Jie Li: Dr. Kiyota's paper emphasizes the importance of exports with respect to final demand in providing job opportunities in three East Asian countries—China, Japan, and Korea—together with Indonesia. Even though the methodology of using the World Input-Output Database is under scrutiny in a regular sense, the results of the current paper are insightful. I will follow up on the author's empirical evidence and present some justifications.
On the theoretical link between exports and employment in China, Fu and Balasubramanyam (2005, 624) argue that, “For several reasons such as over-investment in the state-owned enterprises (SOE) sector, stagnant consumption growth, uneven income distribution and structural distortions, there was also a substantial surplus productive capacity in China in the years following the reforms. Exports provided an effective demand not only for this surplus capacity, but also for its surplus labor.” This “surplus” argument is still valid at the moment, even...