Key Takeaways
- This article is about why Japan (Asia) is often seen as consistently high-quality, why China (Asia) is often seen as more variable, and how a simple scoring method can turn big opinions into testable numbers.
- “Quality” is not a continent trait. It is usually a system result: incentives, training, standards, supplier networks, and how factories prevent defects.
- A single global “quality of everything” ranking does not exist, so a careful proxy score must be used and explained.
Story & Details
The stereotype, and the better question
A common claim says that Chinese products are “bad” while Japanese products are “good,” and it asks why this would be true when both countries are in Asia. The sharper way to ask it is not “who is good,” but “who is consistent, and why.”
Japan (Asia) built a strong global reputation for steady quality partly because many firms learned to treat quality as something made inside the process, not something checked at the end. Ideas linked to Total Quality Management and factory systems like the Toyota Production System focus on stopping problems early, fixing root causes, and keeping suppliers aligned.
China (Asia) is different in a key way: scale and speed. In the same country there are factories that make world-class goods and factories that make cheap goods with weak control. That mix makes the average feel uneven. The story is often about spread, not about a single national skill.
A fixed formula for an “average quality” proxy
To make the debate less emotional, a fixed, simple scoring recipe can be used. It treats “quality across many categories” as a proxy built from two broad public indexes:
- Logistics Performance Index, a World Bank score about how well goods move through trade systems.
- Global Innovation Index, a World Intellectual Property Organization score about how strong innovation systems are.
The proxy score uses three parts, each forced onto a zero-to-ten range by the same idea: take the lowest value in the dataset and the highest value in the dataset, then stretch every country onto the same scale.
The weights are fixed:
- Fifteen percent logistics.
- Thirty-five percent innovation inputs.
- Fifty percent innovation outputs, used here as a stand-in for “final quality.”
Then the combined result is re-scaled again so the best covered economy becomes ten and the worst becomes zero.
Handling “Africa” and Greenland in country-style indexes
Two entities do not fit the usual “country list” shape.
Africa (Africa) is not a country. In this method it becomes a single figure by taking the simple average of African economies that appear in both the logistics and innovation datasets.
Greenland (North America) is often not listed as a full “economy” in these index datasets. In this method it is proxied by Denmark (Europe).
A similar rule was used for missing values: if one index is missing for a place, a regional average is used for that missing piece. Taiwan (Asia) was treated as missing in the innovation dataset used here, so its innovation inputs and outputs were proxied by averaging Japan (Asia), South Korea (Asia), Singapore (Asia), and Hong Kong (Asia).
The one-to-ten snapshot for the requested set
Within the requested set only, the scores were re-mapped so the top becomes ten and the bottom becomes one.
The top and bottom are clear in that one-to-ten view: the United States (North America) is ten, and Africa (Africa) is one.
The full ordered snapshot is: the United States (North America) 10.00; the United Kingdom (Europe) 9.47; the Netherlands (Europe) 9.34; Greenland (North America) 9.26; Germany (Europe) 9.06; China (Asia) 8.99; Taiwan (Asia) 8.95; Japan (Asia) 8.47; Canada (North America) 8.03; Luxembourg (Europe) 7.00; Chile (South America) 3.80; Mexico (North America) 3.36; Uruguay (South America) 3.01; Argentina (South America) 2.56; Peru (South America) 2.54; Ecuador (South America) 1.09; Africa (Africa) 1.00.
A tiny Dutch starter
Simple meaning: a short way to say that quality matters.
Dutch sentence: Kwaliteit is belangrijk.
Word by word: kwaliteit = quality; is = is; belangrijk = important.
Tone and use: neutral and common; it fits work talk and daily talk.
Dutch sentence: Dit product heeft goede kwaliteit.
Word by word: dit = this; product = product; heeft = has; goede = good; kwaliteit = quality.
Tone and use: neutral; useful in shops and in workplace talk.
Conclusions
Big national labels hide the real driver: systems. Japan (Asia) is often linked to steady quality because process discipline and long-run supplier learning reduce surprises. China (Asia) is often linked to uneven quality because the market contains both premium and very low-cost production at huge scale, so the spread is wider.
A proxy score cannot “prove” that one country is always better. It can do something more useful: it forces clear definitions, fixed weights, and a single yardstick, so claims can be discussed with less heat and more structure in December two thousand twenty-five.
Selected References
[1] World Bank, “Connecting to Compete 2023: Trade Logistics in an Uncertain Global Economy” (Logistics Performance Index report, PDF): https://lpi.worldbank.org/sites/default/files/2023-04/LPI_2023_report_with_layout.pdf
[2] World Intellectual Property Organization, “Global Innovation Index 2025” (main publication page): https://www.wipo.int/web-publications/global-innovation-index-2025/en/index.html
[3] World Intellectual Property Organization, “Global Innovation Index Ranking and Economy Profiles”: https://www.wipo.int/gii-ranking/en/
[4] Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers, “History of the Deming Prize” (includes the first award ceremony date): https://www.juse.or.jp/deming_en/award/01.html
[5] Toyota Motor Corporation, “Toyota Production System” (official overview): https://global.toyota/en/company/vision-and-philosophy/production-system/index.html
[6] World Intellectual Property Organization, YouTube video “Explained: What is the Global Innovation Index?”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7m2keucjnk
Appendix
Africa average A single score created by averaging the African economies that appear in both the logistics and innovation datasets, used only to force a continent-shaped label into a country-style table.
Deming Prize A quality award created in Japan (Asia) in the early postwar era, linked to the spread of statistical quality control and later Total Quality Management.
Final quality (proxy) A stand-in measure for broad “end results” based on innovation outputs, used because no single global dataset measures product quality across all categories.
Global Innovation Index A public index by the World Intellectual Property Organization that compares innovation systems across many economies using many indicators.
Innovation inputs The parts of the innovation index that describe conditions that help innovation happen, such as institutions, human capital, infrastructure, and market sophistication.
Innovation outputs The parts of the innovation index that describe what innovation produces, such as knowledge, technology outputs, and creative outputs.
Logistics Performance Index A World Bank index about trade logistics performance, used here as a proxy for supply reliability and consistency.
Min–max scaling A way to put different measures on the same zero-to-ten scale by mapping the lowest observed value to zero and the highest observed value to ten.
Proxy A substitute measure used when the exact thing being discussed cannot be measured directly with a single reliable dataset.
Toyota Production System A manufacturing approach linked to building quality into the process through ideas such as stopping when a problem appears and matching output to demand.
Variability The amount of spread in outcomes; high variability means the same label or origin can range from very good to very poor, even in the same market.
My Diary - Leonardo Cardillo 