A cross-industrial analysis on the task content of trade

This paper estimates the task content of trade for Japanese manufacturing in terms of the number of employees using Japanese Input–Output (IO) Tables. The purpose of this paper is to examine the cross-industrial differences in the task content of trade and to reveal their determinants through descriptive and empirical analyses. For the estimation, the composite task index is calculated for five task categories. From the descriptive analysis, it is found that labour-intensive sectors with low technology tend to have relatively large imports of routine manual tasks. Another finding is that only machinery sectors have a trade surplus in terms of the task content of trade, whereas the trade deficit of routine manual tasks tends to be large in labour-intensive sectors. In addition, empirical results reveal that the industrial characteristics and the occupational structure explain the difference in the task content of trade by sector.