Tetsushi Sonobe

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Verified

Tetsushi verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD
• Professor at National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies

Food insecurity is a serious concern in many developing countries, especially for forest communities, who grapple with unique challenges stemming from their dependence on natural resources and limited access to vital livelihood capitals. Despite extensive research on food security, there still remains a gap in understanding the distinct factors aff...

Achieving access to clean and safe water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) for all is one of the Sustainable Development Goals. However, most efforts to improve access to clean and safe WASH focus on a single practice, resulting in a low adoption rate and limited impact. This study analyses data from 63,732 rural households from the 76th Round of the...

Based on contextualized primary time-use survey data gathered in India in 2022, the paper examines the gendered effects of elderly caregiving on care providers’ well-being outcomes. It looks at labor supply, time allocation, life satisfaction, happiness, and health outcomes. Using two-stage least squares instrumental variables estimation, it finds...

The urgent need for a net-zero future necessitates a fundamental shift in the energy sector, with road transportation responsible for a substantial 37% of global energy-related CO 2 emissions in 2021, emerging as a pivotal focal point in the battle against climate change. Energy consumption in the road sector is expected to surge by 1.26% with a 1%...

Food security (FS) is the availability, access, and affordability of food to meet dietary needs for a healthy life. Institutions that create order in society by reducing uncertainties like resource unavailability, conflict, and poor governance play a crucial role in FS. Key institutional qualities include democracy, the rule of law, control of cor...

Water shortage is one of the major environmental challenges in emerging Asian economies such as India and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), presenting significant threats to livelihood and food security in coming decades. The growing population, increasing demand for food, rapid urbanization, and climate-induced water stress will make water an...

Dietary diversity among children is a crucial factor influencing their nutritional status; therefore, this paper uses data from four rounds of the Cambodia Demographic and Health Survey (CDHS) to examine the minimum dietary diversity among children aged 6–23 months. Multilevel binary regression is used to evaluate the variation in minimum dietary d...

Global efforts to accomplish net zero carbon emission are implausible without attaining Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7, which pertains to facilitating access to clean energy sources. Despite numerous initiatives, 2.9 billion people, mostly from South Asia and Africa, are without access to clean cooking fuel. The current study uses Demographic...

• Women farmers play a crucial role in South Asia's agricultural sector and contribute significantly, despite facing numerous challenges. • The intersection of climate change, gender, and health can have disproportionate impacts on women's well-being. • Communicable and non-communicable diseases, occupational hazards, and mental health issues are e...

Conflicts between humans and wildlife, particularly involving common leopards (Panthera pardus) and Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) in the Himalayan region, pose significant challenges for both communities and conservation efforts. This study fills crucial gaps in existing research, extending beyond landscape-level predictors of these conflicts....

Literature has highlighted the existence of a gap in clean fuel usage between the social groups in most emerging nations across the world, which is detrimental to global efforts to achieve Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7 (access to clean energy) and SDG 10 (reducing inequalities) and just energy transition with recognition justice. This paper,...

The construction industry is known for its significant environmental footprint, marked by its major contribution to the depletion of natural resources, extensive energy consumption, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, air pollution, environmental degradation, and global warming. The adoption of the circular economy (CE) within the construction industry...

Nutritional security is fundamental for fostering the human capital development of nations and, hence, future prosperity and economic growth. The dietary diversity among children is a crucial factor influencing the nutritional status of the children; therefore, this paper uses data from five rounds of the Cambodia Demographic Health Survey spanning...

Using a contextualized primary time-use survey (TUS) data, we examine the gendered effects of unpaid care work on care providers' well-being outcomes-labor supply, time allocation, life satisfaction, happiness, and health in India. A reduced form weighted composite score of health conditions and assistance need within household, and presence of car...

The natural environment is negatively impacted by the daily fuel use for domestic purposes, particularly in developing nations with large populations, such as India, where biomass is the primary source of fuel for household cooking. However, a greater understanding is needed about the trends, patterns, and factors affecting household energy consump...

This special issue contributes to the development economics literature by highlighting the role of information communication and technologies (ICTs) in supporting rural and agricultural development. It is comprised of nine papers. Key findings from this special issue include: (1) internet use increases rural consumption diversity and agricultural p...

Using a contextualized primary time-use survey (TUS) data, we examine the gendered effects of unpaid care work on care providers' well-being outcomes-labor supply, time allocation, life satisfaction, happiness, and health in India. A reduced form weighted composite score of health conditions and assistance need within household, and presence of car...

In this article, we review and shed light on the interlinkages between interstate war and food insecurity and discuss global policy actions needed to address the challenges of food insecurity due to interstate war. We conceptualize the interlinkages between these two issues with a focus on: (i) the most critical and direct cause of interstate war,...

In this article, we review and shed light on the interlinkages between interstate war and food insecurity and discuss global policy actions needed to address the challenges of food insecurity due to interstate war. We conceptualize the interlinkages between these two issues with a focus on: (i) the most critical and direct cause of interstate war,...

Hypertension has been the most common non-communicable disease in low and middle-income countries for the past two decades, increasing cardiovascular and renal disease risk. Urbanization, aging, dietary and lifestyle changes, high illiteracy rates, poor access to health facilities, poverty, high costs of drugs, and social stress have contributed to...

Using a three-year panel data (2016–2018) of about 6000 households per year in Nepal, this study assesses the association between ethnicity and caste-based social differentiation and the consumption of clean cooking energy. This study applies a random effect logit model for analysing the factors explaining the choice of clean cooking energy and, in...

Global food security is threatened by the confluence of increasing demand for food due to a growing population and the inability of the food production system to meet the increasing demand due to climate change, worsening soil fertility, and challenges to water availability. These factors jeopardize achieving the Sustainable Development Goals such...

There is an increasing interest in the impact assessment of management training programs. Among various types of training, this study focuses on those featuring Kaizen, a standard approach to production management and quality control whose name derives from the Japanese word meaning “improvement.” Previous studies of Kaizen training programs evalua...

At present nearly half of the world’s population is under some form of government restriction to curb the spread of COVID-19, an extremely contagious disease. In Bangladesh, in the wake of five deaths and 48 infections from COVID-19, between March 24 and May 30, 2020, the government imposed a nationwide lockdown. While this lockdown restricted the...

This paper analyzes panel data of micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in Vietnam, covering five two-year periods from 2003 to 2012, in order to understand how MSMEs' investments in their own productive fixed assets and their financial investment changed during and after the global financial crisis of 2008. It finds that MSMEs decreas...

While entrepreneurs play a key role in industrial development, the managerial capacity of those in developing countries seems limited. A number of randomized controlled trials have been conducted to evaluate the impacts of management training, coaching, or consultation programs. These studies found that the interventions had positive impacts on man...

Life of the “developmental state” concept has its ups and downs. Its heyday had lasted from the mid-1980s until the Asian financial crisis broke out in the late 1990s. Many analysts considered that it would face almost certain death following that crisis, during which the term “developmental state” seemed to connote “crony capitalism”. Nonetheless,...

The book defines the developmental state as a low-or middle-income country led by political leaders, technocrats, and bureaucrats who share a strong will to deliver rapid economic growth so that the country catches up with high-income countries. The pursuit of the goal is made difficult by various factors, such as the world or regional order, the v...

It is difficult for middle-income countries, including emerging states, to become high-income countries in a timely manner. According to the economist, the reason is that the private sector is incapable of upgrading products, productivity, and industrial structure. According to the political scientist, the reason is that previous economic growth ha...

This open access book modifies and revitalizes the concept of the ‘developmental state’ to understand the politics of emerging economy through nuanced analysis on the roles of human agency in the context of structural transformation. In other words, there is a revived interest in the ‘developmental state’ concept. The nature of the ‘emerging state’...

Only a very small number of industries have achieved successful development in developing countries other than several East Asian countries. Exceptionally, the garment industry and the pharmaceutical industry in Bangladesh have grown from scratch into major producers in the respective world markets within a few decades after the early 1980s. They h...

This chapter addresses the question of why successful industrial development in Africa requires the dissemination of Kaizen. For this purpose, it begins with a simple definition of the approach. While detailed explanations are provided in subsequent chapters, this chapter briefly explains what characterizes Kaizen, how it was born in Japan and why...

At present, how to develop industries is a burning issue in Africa, where population growth remains high and economic development has thus far failed to provide sufficient jobs for many, especially young people and women. The creation of productive jobs through industrial development ought to be a central issue in steering economic activity across...

In recent years, there has been renewed interest in the productivity movement, and in particular the diffusion of Kaizen management as an approach to industrial development in developing countries. While a number of previous studies have evaluated the impact of the introduction of Kaizen on management practices and business performance, few studies...

More often than not, manufacturing industries are clustered in small areas in developing economies of Asia and sub‐Saharan Africa (SSA). While agglomeration economies arising from low transaction costs are a clear advantage of industrial clusters, a drawback is the ease of imitation, which leads to the gap between social and private benefits of inn...

This paper attempts to propose a strategy to support industrial development in Sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, it offers the following three closely related components in the development strategy: sequential support, which starts with the training of entrepreneurs followed by infrastructure investment and financial support (TIF); linkage with fo...

If the middle-income traps were merely equated with prolonged growth slowdowns occurring in the middle-income stage, as it is in some empirical studies, this concept would lose the meaning of existence. This paper proposes a new definition that considers the trap the aggravation of slowdowns due to inadequate responses, such as the adoption of coun...

This chapter attempts to demonstrate the importance of technology transfer from abroad in the development of industrial clusters in developing countries by comparing the cases of cluster development with and without introducing technological and managerial knowledge from abroad. In particular, focus is placed on spectacular development of the garme...

While the model of long-term development of industrial districts proposed by Sonobe and Otsuka (Cluster-based industrial development: an East Asian model. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2006; Cluster-based industrial development: a comparative study of Asia and Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2011) is useful for understanding the economic...

There has been renewed interest in productivity movement, especially the diffusion of Kaizen management, as an approach to industrial development in developing countries in recent years. While some previous studies evaluate the impact of the introduction of Kaizen on management practices and business performance, few studies have been conducted to...

It has been increasingly recognized that entrepreneurship holds the key to industrial development in developing countries [World Bank (2012)]. Indeed, a significant number of studies find that productivity and profitability vary greatly across enterprises even in the same industry in the same country, and that a large part of the variation can be a...

We conducted a randomized controlled trial of short-term management training for small manufacturers in two study sites in Vietnam and collected follow-up data repeatedly for two years to assess longer-term impacts than the existing studies of management training. Our training programs introduced participants to Kaizen, a common-sense approach to p...

Managerial capital has received attention in recent years as one of the major determinants for enterprise productivity, growth, and longevity. While recent empirical studies make it clear that training intervention can improve the management level, it remains unclear why the managers had not made efforts to obtain these basic knowledge. To test the...

In recent years, several randomized controlled experiments as well as experiments that are not randomized have been conducted to assess the impacts of management training intervention on the productivity and other aspects of business performance of firms. Yet the role played by management improvement vis-à-vis that of technology transfer or borrowi...

In Vietnam, we have selected a knitwear cluster in Hatay province, which is near Hanoi but still surrounded by rural landscape. As in our sites in Addis Ababa (Chapter 6) and Dar es Salaam (Chapter 8), we conducted a classroom training program, in which trainees study in a classroom, and an onsite training programs, in which instructors visit train...

In Ethiopia, we implemented a classroom-training program and an on-site training program for entrepreneurs operating metalworking enterprises with three or more workers. The measurement of the training impacts in Ethiopia is likely to be affected by the increasingly favorable access to the knowledge of Kaizen due to the recent government policy of...

While policymakers in developing countries are eager to develop industries for job creation and poverty reduction, they are unaware of effective strategies to support industrial development. Surprisingly, neither international development organizations nor donor communities have provided useful recommendations for successful industrial development,...

Micro and small enterprises are widely recognized as a major source of employment and income in developing countries. If they grow in size, they would contribute more to economic growth and poverty reduction. In reality, however, their productivity remains low and their sizes remain small (e.g., Mead and Lieadholm, 1998; Tybout, 2000). While their...

For the last 15 years, we have conducted well over 20 intensive case studies of the development of industrial clusters beginning with Northeast Asia (Japan, Taiwan, and China), moving to one part of East Asia (Vietnam) and South Asia (Bangladesh and Pakistan), and finally proceeding to SSA (Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania). Most of these studi...

This chapter attempts to assess the impacts of teaching the very basics of Kaizen to owners of small enterprises has on their business performance. This experiment was conducted in a metalworking cluster in Nairobi, Kenya. In this cluster, Sonobe et al.’s (2011) observational study found that the enterprises varied considerably in the way they were...

In the garment cluster in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, a large number of self-employed tailors and a small number of ready-made garment (RMG) factories coexist, as we described in our previous study (Sonobe and Otsuka, 2011, Chapter 9). The enterprise data that we collected for the previous study in 2007 were used as baseline data for the present study o...

Until recently, it was generally believed that the acquisition of technological capability through technology transfer is essential to industrial development in developing countries, as manifested by such well-known works as Pack and Westphal (1986), Lall (1992), and the immense literature on technology spillovers from multinational firms to local...

In Tanzania, we conducted a new round of surveys of garment enterprises in March 2012. Although these enterprises are located in Dar es Salaam, they are not geographically as concentrated as in other clusters. We refer to this survey as the third follow-up survey because we conducted the first follow-up survey earlier in September 2010 after the cl...

While the role of rural informal industrial clusters in generating income and employment opportunities for the rural poor is widely acknowledged, studies seldom examine the growth process of informal industries in developing countries. Particularly, studies seldom examine why many of the informal industrial clusters in developing countries perform...

Corruption is widespread in Bangladesh. According to a report of the international watchdog Transparency International, during 2001–2005, Bangladesh was the most corrupt country in the world. How to combat corruption in Bangladesh is now an important agenda for both international donor agencies and the government. Using game theory, this paper prop...

In recent years, managerial capital has received attention as one of the major determinants of enterprise productivity, growth, and longevity. This paper attempts to assess the impacts of a management training program on the business performance of small enterprises in a metalworking cluster in Nairobi, Kenya. A previous study of this cluster obser...

Family-based traditional microenterprises are abundant in developing countries, and in many cases they are a major source of income and employment for both urban and rural poor. With a few exceptions, however, most of these family-based traditional microenterprises in the rural areas of developing countries seldom grow in terms of enterprises' size...

Poor management has long been suspected as a major constraint on job creation in the manufacturing sector in low-income countries. In this sector, numerous micro and small enterprises in industrial clusters account for a large share of employment. This paper examines the roles of industrial clusters and entrepreneurship in improving productivity an...

This article provides a case study of the Ethiopian flower export industry which successfully emerged at time when the EU market (main destination) was already characterised by increasingly stringent standards and delivery requirements. Entering this market required a multitude of capabilities at firm, sector and national levels. Several of these c...

In industrial clusters, transaction costs are kept low and free riding is discouraged by a community mechanism developed through dense and repeated interactions among entrepreneurs. In such environments, new entrants without established reputations and connections are put at a distinct disadvantage. This negative effect on new entry must be neutral...

Many observational studies of micro and small enterprises have found that enterprise performance and education levels of entrepreneurs are positively associated. Does it follow that entrepreneurs’ management capacities depend on their academic achievements? This paper examines what types of entrepreneurs participated in a managerial training progra...

Although consensus exists that industrial development is imperative in developing countries to reduce poverty and to attain sustainable economic growth, there is no consensus on how to develop industries in developing countries. Based on empirical findings, emerging literature on industrial development stresses the accumulation of human capital by...

The export-oriented garment industry in Bangladesh has grown rapidly for the last 3 decades and now ranks among the largest garment exporters in the world. While its early success is attributed to the initial technology transfer from South Korea, such a one-time infusion of knowledge alone is insufficient to explain the sustained growth for 3 decad...

In sub-Saharan Africa, manufacturers operating in spontaneously developed industrial clusters are very small in size, have low productivity, and, except when they are at a young stage, become stagnant. The literature has related the preponderance of such enterprises to their socioeconomic surroundings. This paper reconsiders the issue by looking at...

The vast majority of micro and small enterprises in developing countries are located in industrial clusters, and the majority of such clusters have yet to see their growth take off. The performance of micro and small enterprise clusters is especially low in Sub-Saharan Africa. While existing studies often attribute the poor performance to factors o...

This paper examines the association between the outcome of business incubation and the resources used by incubators, by using a small panel of science and technology business incubators (STBIs) in China. We find that while the number of firms graduating from an STBI is closely correlated with the infrastructure as well as the human and financial re...

The need to construct an effective strategy for industrial development in low-income countries has been largely ignored by development economists because industrial policies have failed in many developing countries. This does not imply, however, that industrial development cannot be promoted. This paper attempts to synthesize the conventional wisdo...

This paper examines the association between the outcome of business incubation and the resources used by incubators, by using a small panel of science and technology business incubators (STBIs) in China. We find that while the number of firms graduating from an STBI is closely correlated with the infrastructure as well as the human and financial re...

Small and informal enterprises are preponderant in Africa’s manufacturing sector. Their growth is negligibly low except when young and small, but little is known beyond this. This paper reports the results of our field study of a metalworking cluster in Nairobi. As competition was intensified by the entry of new enterprises, the education level of...

Tenancy markets provide an opportunity to trade land between labor-scarce farm households and labor-abundant households. In China and other rapidly growing countries in Asia where rural to urban migration is becoming active, facilitating well-functioning tenancy markets is important to increase farm size and farmer’s income. In China, however, indi...

In order to investigate the effectiveness of science and technology industrial parks (STIPs), this study examines data on high-tech firms within and outside the STIPs in China, while paying special attention to the issues related to agglomeration and congestion. The main finding is that the negative effect of congestion on productivity is highly li...

Having demonstrated the importance of traders and managerial human capital in carrying out multifaceted innovations in previous chapters, Part IV (Chapters 8 and 8) explores how the success or failure of industrial development is governed by the development strategies of the private sector and the government, based on the case studies of the garmen...

The China shock (massive, often sudden, and sharp increases in imports of cheap Chinese products) has affected many industries producing tradable products in a large number of low-income countries, including those in SSA (Zafar, 2007; Villoria, 2009). Part III of this book (Chapters 6 and 7) explores the issue of how such industries in low-income c...

The critical importance of managerial human capital in carrying out multifaceted innovations, including upgrading of products in Vietnam, has been reported in Chapter 4 and a large number of other case studies in other Asian countries. The question now arises as to whether managerial human capital plays a similar role in SSA. True, it has been foun...

Widespread and persistent poverty in the majority of developing countries is one of the most serious issues currently facing the world. In order to reduce poverty, ample employment opportunities must be created for the poor. To achieve this, the development of labor-intensive industries is the key, as agriculture can provide only limited employment...

As was hypothesized in Chapter 1, traders play a critically important role in the development of industrial clusters (see Hypothesis 2). Also important is the managerial human capital of enterprise managers, which is conducive to multifaceted innovations (see Hypothesis 1). The purpose of Part I (Chapters 2 and 3) is to test these two hypotheses ba...

The US preferential trade policy AGOA (the African Growth and Opportunity Act) was signed into law in 2000. It has provided garment industries in sub-Saharan Africa with duty-free and quota-free access to the US market while allowing the use of third-country fabric as an input. This opportunity is similar to the one given to the Bangladeshi garment...

While Chapter 2 explored the impact of overseas Vietnamese traders on the performance of garment enterprises in Northern Vietnam, this chapter provides an in-depth analysis to uncover the role of petty traders in the performance of garment enterprises in Nairobi. As was specified in Hypothesis 2 in Chapter 1, traders are important in the developmen...