Past Research Projects

JICA-RI/GDN Joint Research Project "Quality and Productivity Improvement in the private and public sectors – Roles and Lessons from Kaizen Approaches"

The fact that the low income countries fail to attain sustainable growth is attributed to the low productivity due to the low quality of workers’ skills and poor management capacity. Especially, in those countries, the weak management capacity in the private sector prevents productivity improvement.

On the other hand, the middle income countries often face the “Middle Income Trap” that once a country reaches middle income economy from low income economy it becomes stagnant and unable to transform to high income economy.

In this situation, the approaches for fostering the industrial competitiveness in improving productivity could be as follows:
(1) Policy reforms,
(2) Improvement of management capacity.

In this joint research project, we focus on the second approach. We will analyze the effectiveness and the challenges of the productivity improvement through the cases of Kaizen activities in private and public sectors in developing countries. The research compiles the outcomes of the series of Kaizen activities that are not studied systematically until now, and will be widely shared.