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KOBAYASHI, Nobuo
Professor
Research Keywords
Industrial Clusters, Knowledge Spillover, Small Business, Business Start-ups, Knowledge-Intensive Business Services
Recent Research Interests
Many regional industrial agglomerations in Japan have been competitive internationally in the past. However, these agglomerations have become weaker due to economic difficulties in the business environment, shortage of successors (skilled workers in particular), and a deepening of international division of labor. After the 1990s, manufacturing functions moved to Asian countries (China primarily) which led to problems of de-industrialization.
My principal interest is to determine how these industrial agglomerations can be enhanced given this division of labor. In practical terms, my main research topics are as follows: 1) to analyze the ratio of regional business start-ups to reveal political implications designed to boost entrepreneurship; 2) to assess the regional knowledge spillover effect, and 3) to analyze the regional determinants of growth in knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) sectors. The commonality in these topics is to find ways in which we can upgrade the regional industrial structure in the service economy to promote basic industries in the next generation.