Data Construction and Productivity Analysis on the Medical Device Manufacturing Industry in Japan

Medical devices play an essential role in healthcare. However, statistics on the Japanese medical device industry are insufficient. This study provides statistics for Japan’s medical device manufacturing industry from 1994 to 2016 using the Census of Manufacture (Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry). In addition, this study presents a fundamental analysis of industry, productivity analysis, and inter-industry comparison. As evaluated by labour productivity and total factor productivity, the medical device manufacturing industry (1) is research and development (R&D) intensive, (2) does not have sufficient investment in R&D, and (3) has low productivity. This study concludes that it is essential to improve the accuracy of data in the future and to publish data regularly.