Economic Analysis of Management Knowledge Diffusion in Ethiopia

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 24402020
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B)
• Allocation Type: Partial Multi-year Fund
• Section: 海外学術
• Research Field: Economic policy
• Research Institution: National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies
• Principal Investigator: SONOBE Tetsushi 政策研究大学院大学, 政策研究科, 教授 (70254133)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): OTSUKA Keijiro 政策研究大学院大学, 政策研究科, 特別教授 (50145653)
• Project Period (FY): 2012-04-01 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: 経営知識 / 技術普及 / 産業発展 / カイゼン / アフリカ / エチオピア

Outline of Final Research Achievements

In developing countries, an urgent policy agenda is to mitigate the severe shortage of management knowledge in order to enhance industrial development. For this purpose, this study collected and analyized the panel data of firms in Ethiopia, where the government is leading the movement toward the diffusion of Kaizen, Japanese management practices. It has turned out that Kaizen diffusion has begun from large firms that keenly sense the need to improve product quality and productivity. Among other major findings are that there are opportunities of knowledge spillovers among firms, that firms adopting Kaizen in an Ethiopian way tend to succeed in making the knowledge adoption contribute to business performance, and that unlike the diffusion of piecemeal engineering technology, the diffusion of management knowledge can be assisted by media campaign effectively.

Free Research Field

経済学