Most entrepreneurs start their businesses with experience as employees. In a recent study (Asuyama 2026), I found that more opportunities for employees to learn “entrepreneur-like tasks” increase the entrepreneurship rate. “Entrepreneur-like tasks” are identified as those involving more diverse, autonomous, financial and sales-related, and managerial activities, with fewer compiling tasks. Notably, greater learning opportunities foster innovative or large-employment entrepreneurs. These results highlight the importance of recognizing that the size of employees’ learning opportunities for entrepreneurial tasks significantly influences a country’s entrepreneurship rate when designing entrepreneurship policies.

This study examines China’s wildlife governance in the aftermath of COVID-19. In response to the pandemic, China undertook several legal reforms to strengthen public health regulation, which partially incorporated the One Health approach—the idea that human, animal, and environmental health are deeply interconnected. However, significant enforcement challenges persist. China’s wildlife industry is extensive and therefore resistant to tighter controls. Furthermore, international pressures surrounding debates over the origins of COVID-19 contributed to a gradual erosion of regulatory momentum.

In recent decades, the global number of refugees has reached record highs. While public debate in advanced democracies often focuses on the increasing visibility of refugees at their borders, the majority are hosted not in the Global North but in the Global South. Yet, even within the Global South, the distribution of refugee arrivals is strikingly uneven. Some countries receive vast numbers of refugees, whereas others host very few, despite facing similar geographic or economic conditions. What explains this variation? What does it reveal about the political foundations of refugee protection?

Career decisions are often seen as personal choices, yet in societies shaped by strong family ties and traditional norms, they are rarely made alone. This column presents how young Filipinos perceive career decision-making autonomy when personal aspirations conflict with parental advice. Using an experimental vignette survey with 1,174 university students, participants evaluated whether a hypothetical son or daughter appeared autonomous when choosing a career despite parental pressure. Results reveal a consistent pattern: daughters were perceived as more autonomous than sons. The findings point to the importance of fostering gender-balanced autonomy in career decision-making.

Although technological progress is driven by technological learning derived from domestic and foreign knowledge sources, the dynamic interaction between the two principal learning modes—learning by doing (domestic sources) and learning by importing (foreign sources)—remains insufficiently understood, despite their crucial influence on a country’s transition from duplicative imitation to creative imitation and eventually to innovation. Drawing on an embedded case study of China’s successful catch‑up in nuclear power reactor technology, we identify a “smile curve” in the evolution of technological learning, wherein the relative significance of learning by doing and learning by importing follows a U-shaped trajectory. Furthermore it shows that intangible (e.g., talent acquisition) and tangible (e.g., equipment) components of learning by importing exhibit the same smile curve pattern. These findings provide potential solutions for latecomers to overcome technological catch-up challenges through sequence learning strategies.

Why does a leader who cemented his political dominance through a centralized presidential system increasingly struggle to deliver economic stability and political confidence? This column, based on my latest book on Turkey’s Erdoğan administration, argues that the answer lies in the gradual erosion of what can be called “attraction politics.” For much of his rule, Erdoğan maintained dominance not through coercion but through a combination of economic performance, social protection, and narrative control. These pillars sustained broad public support for nearly two decades. Yet they rested on constitutional institutions. Once the centralized presidential system eroded these institutions, the three pillars no longer translated into effective governance.

Acquiring human capital and climbing the ladder of manufacturing sophistication are standard policy aspirations for middle-income countries. Recently China, itself a middle-income country, has expanded production and exports in product categories demanding of greater skills and technological complexity. Its success in production and exports has attenuated opportunities for similar countries to expand their own skill-intensive exports. We use a global trade model to quantify the effects of China’s growth on export opportunities for other countries, then explore the consequences of reduced relative skills demand for returns to schooling and incentives for skills development in those countries’ labor markets.

With the rise of digital platforms, it is often assumed that we have entered a "flat world" (Friedman 2007) where content can be delivered globally at no extra cost. In a recent article (Watabe, Yang, and Kanasheuski 2025), we challenge this assumption using data from the digital game platform Steam. We find that even in a purely digital environment where physical shipping costs are zero, consumers are still significantly less likely to purchase games developed in distant countries. Further analysis suggests that information barriers and cultural preferences prevent the digital economy from being truly borderless.

In many rural economies, families rely heavily on seasonal farm work, and children’s labor can be essential during peak agricultural periods. When schools schedule high-stakes examinations during these peak seasons, parents choose between keeping their children in school or sending them to the fields to secure household income— facing the difficult task of weighing the immediate benefit of their children's labor against the potential long-term gains of continued schooling. This study finds that when national school examinations coincide with the main harvest season, dropout increases sharply among children from agricultural households—predominantly among boys of secondary-school age. This research highlights a largely overlooked constraint in education policy: the timing of the school year matters as much as the structure of schooling itself.