Does Industry Cooperation Policy Matter? Evidence from Five Prefectures in Japan
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript is interesting .
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Author Response
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Reviewer 2 Report
Dear authors,
please correct the following:
- you should provide the important information in Abstract (the purpose, methodology, main results, conclusions with suggestions for further research); Current Introduction does not clearly state why this research is important and how this paper advances the understanding of the topic.
- Introduction: please add scientific relevant literature according to the international standards;
- the methodology part should be rewritten: sample, what was the population, sampling (according to statistical rules ...)
- The contribution of the research needs to be clear. Clearly state the goals of the study and hypothesis.
- Limitations, benefits and future research are not elaborated.
- the paper should be proofread, there are some grammatical errors in the text.
Best regards
Author Response
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Reviewer 3 Report
The topic of the paper is interesting, but the presentation of the research lacks a lot in terms of rigor and even scientific significance. The main concerns I have with the paper are the following:
- It is not clear to me which is the research objective and how was this objective approached in the paper
- There is no literature mentioned; certainly, no one would expect many papers on the specific subject of the paper, but the authors make no effort to refer to literature that approaches inter-states or inter-region cooperation. This is a major flaw of the paper.
- The methodological part of the paper is badly explained and I believe that the conducted research has flaws.
- One of them refers to the period when the surveys were conducted - they were conducted at different moments for different regions, which leads to a gap of 4 years between some regions in terms of response collection. Therefore, comparing the results between the Japanese regions is completely wrong. As a result, there is no value to be extracted from here in terms of scientific content.
- I did not understand who was included in the sample and who responded to the survey. The authors mention only companies, but it is not clear which are the positions of the respondents in these companies, which may significantly distort the results.
- There is a puzzling (to me) mention in the paper, i.e. that there is a response rate of 30-40% for surveys sent by mail and only 4% to those sent by fax or network (I presume network means Internet). This is unrealistic and raises many questions regarding the overall research.
- The paper is completely disorganised and chaotic, with big tables that are not at all easy to understand. It was difficult for me to follow the logic of research presentation.
Author Response
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Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper is good.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
I appreciate that authors have constructively responded to my previous comments. Still, some issues need to be resolved, as follows:
- The new section on Literature review is small and, more important, fails in explaining the gaps in literature that the paper is fulfilling
- The Hypothesis is wrongly defined, as it is too vague - what does it mean that "cooperation matters?". The authors need to propose a more concrete hypothesis, that can be effectively tested by their research.
- Table 1 is not easy to understand, so it needs to be split in 4 different tables in order for the readers to have a good understanding of the sample used
Author Response
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