Abstract
The importance of understanding the real technological power of Japanese industries relative to ones of other countries in the realm of Environmentally Sound Technologies (EST) has become pressing for Japanese government and companies to design and implement more effective policies or strategies furthermore. Therefore, this paper aims to ascertain the technological status of Japanese global competitiveness in all areas of the realm with a bird's-eye view, by analyzing meaningful patent counts extracted from PATSTAT database that covers 172 countries (regions). And, in order to gain in-depth insight into the competitiveness in each area of the realm, we develop a novel methodology to identify relative technologies including not only 'core technology' but also 'proximal technology' by employing IPC 'co-occurrence' approach. Moreover, we take account of the 'home country bias' of domestic inventors through counting 'patent families'. The results of our study reveal that Japan is particularly prominent in very few areas such as solar PV technologies by comparing with US or Germany, who are the real world champions in the EST realm.
