B P International

In knowledge economies, building technological capability is a continuous process and unarguably key to industrial policy development. Learning [by-doing in the industry] has been linked to a reduction in unit labor cost and overall production cost of goods and services. In this study, we comparatively studied the learning pattern of the Japanese manufacturing and service sector using industrial-leveldata. This study is perhaps the first attempt to comparatively study the productivity of the Japanese industry using the learning curve at the aggregate level. Looking back to almost 4 decade-long (19802017) of financial input-output data, we estimated the trend in technological learning using various learning models, calculated the annual progress ratios (via production function imputed in log-linear & cubic model) and revealed the dynamic technological learning across the two sectors at the aggregate level. This enabled us to identify years with good learning rates which are synonym...

In Malaysia, there is a profusion of evidence of high graduate unemployment since many graduates are found lacking of what are needed to acquire and to maintain their jobs. In this paper, graduate employability skills were analyzed based on four major criteria: Qualification, academic score, experience and specific soft skills. The data and information used were extracted from 300 online job advertisements accessed via electronic databases at http://www.JobStreet.com.my from January to March 2011. A simple checklist form was developed to quantify the information from ads into quantitative data that was later keyed in the Statistical Package for Social Science for descriptive analyses. Based on the data, it was concluded that graduates with bachelor degrees were more likely to be employable due to high demand. It was also found that academic excellence based on CGPA was not the utmost factor for graduate employability. However, since less than one-third ads were free from work experi...