Institut français de recherche sur le Japon à la Maison franco-japonaise (Umifre 19, MEAE-CNRS)

Summary

Promoting business start-ups has been regarded as an important policy issue in Japan since more than 20 years. Japanese government has started in 2014 a new promotion policy of acknowledging and supporting municipalities’ program proposals for local start-up support based on local public-private partnerships. When the proposals are acknowledged, municipality governments, local private agencies, and potential entrepreneurs can obtain financial support from the central government. We empirically estimate the causal effect of this new policy on local start-up ratio using regional panel data of all municipalities for five periods from 2001 to 2016, and find positive and significant (though modest) effect of this policy, especially for regions that look unfavorable for start-ups.

Profile

Hiroyuki Okamuro is Professor at the Graduate School of Economics, Hitotsubashi University, Japan, and a consulting fellow at the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI). He holds a Ph.D. in Economics (Dr. rer. pol.) from the University of Bonn, Germany. Okamuro is currently Associate Editor of the Journal of Small Business Management and Editorial Review Board Member of Small Business Economics. His major research interests are entrepreneurship, small business, innovation and policy evaluation. Among his publications, Nishimura, J. and Okamuro, H. (2018). Internal and external discipline: The effect of project leadership and government monitoring on the performance of publicly funded R&D consortia. Research Policy 47 (6), 840-853; Okamuro, H. and Nishimura, J. (2018). Whose business is your project? A comparative study of different subsidy policy schemes for collaborative R&D. Technological Forecasting and Social Change 127, 85-96.

Moderator: Adrienne SALA (FRIJ-MFJ)
Organization: IFRJ-MFJ
Co-organization: CCIFJ France Japon
Support: Ambassade de France au Japon