Restructuring Japanese Business for Growth consists of eighteen previously unpublished invited chapters by experts on Japanese business. It will attract both commercial and academic interest. Japanese business can be expected to continue to be of great importance in global and Asian economics, especially as the Japanese economy is the dominant economy in Asia, being larger than all other Asian economies combined. Policymakers and business people interested in understanding Japanese financial markets will find this book useful. In addition, this book should be a valuable resource for undergraduate, graduate, and executive development courses in international business, global finance, and Japanese business.

In this study the views of Japan's leading experts on the globalization of Japanese business, management and industrial relations explain how traditional Japanese-style management is responding to the changes following the collapse of the bubble economy. The areas covered include the changes made in management itself inside Japan and also how it is adapting itself when transferred overseas. The book demonstrates how management is moving towards a hybrid type in overseas operations and towards a western-style in Japan, where contractual principles are beginning to be given greater weight.

With little domestic fanfare and even less attention internationally, Japan has been reinventing itself since the 1990s, dramatically changing its political economy, from one managed by regulations to one with a neoliberal orientation. Rebuilding from the economic misfortunes of its recent past, the country retains a formidable economy and its political system is healthier than at any time in its history. Japan Transformed explores the historical, political, and economic forces that led to the country's recent evolution, and looks at the consequences for Japan's citizens and global neighbors. The book examines Japanese history, illustrating the country's multiple transformations over the centuries, and then focuses on the critical and inexorable advance of economic globalization. It describes how global economic integration and urbanization destabilized Japan's postwar policy coalition, undercut the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's ability to buy votes, and paved the way for new electoral rules that emphasized competing visions of the public good. In contrast to the previous system that pitted candidates from the same party against each other, the new rules tether policymaking to the vast swath of voters in the middle of the political spectrum. Regardless of ruling party, Japan's politics, economics, and foreign policy are on a neoliberal path. Japan Transformed combines broad context and comparative analysis to provide an accurate understanding of Japan's past, present, and future.

The growth of Japanese business to a dominant world position in the post-war era has attracted many Western studies and analyses of Japanese management methods in comparision with those of the West. This is an inside account by leading Japanese experts of the way in which individual Japanese firms came to dominate world markets. The text charts the rise of household names such as Canon and Toyota against the background of growth and restructuring that took place in Japan after the war. It should interest anyone who wishes to understand the strategies by which Japanese business has achieved its success.

In order to regain its competitiveness, Japan is restructuring and globalizing its business and economics system, as well as other aspects of society. How it is resolving this is of huge interest to its global trading partners. With contributions from well-known North American and Japanese academics, this book discusses these issues from historical, analytical and empirical perspectives.

Emerging from ten years of post-bubble recession, the Japanese business and economic system will need to enter a period of radical restructuring in order to return to the growth of former years and maintain its influential position in the development of new technologies. Japan's choices for the future will have a major impact on its global trading partners. In this edited collection of papers, an international range of contributors discuss the fundamental issues faced by the Japanese business and economic system from historical, analytical and empirical perspectives. Their conclusions combine to present a view of the path Japan should take to restore its economy to optimal growth in the 21st century, and show how this path will affect global markets.

This book contains the revised and updated versions of twelve papers which were presented at the 17th joint seminar of the faculties of economics of the Universities of Nagoya and Freiburg. The seminar took place in 1997 in Nagoya and marked the 25th anniversary of the cooperation between both faculties. The subjects of the book concentrate on long-term economic and business issues common to Japan and Germany on the turn of our century.Firstly, both countries experience continuing and interrelated problems in the labor market, budget deficits, demographic changes and the future of the social security system. Secondly, globalization, technical progress and shift of social values lead to structural changes of the economy and its institutions, particularly to deregulations and network economies. As a consequence, new ways of cooperation between firms, customers and suppliers will be established. Thirdly, the network economy changes also the inner structure and management of the companies in both countries including new organizational patterns such as the holding company or the virtual enterprise, the tight cooperation of small and medium-sized companies, human resource management and compensation.Although the broad issues in both countries - as in other mature economies - are essentially the same, the details under the surface are different and therefore ask for different solutions. The identification of these similarities and differences by theoretical and empirical methods constituted a key objective of the seminar, as well as of previous seminars.

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This paper presents a framework for quantitatively evaluating the macroeconomic effects of corporate restructuring and applies it to Japan. Using firm-level financial statement data, it estimates total factor productivity (TFP) of individual Japanese firms. Given the estimated distribution of productivity across firms, the paper simulates the effect of optimal restructuring, that is, reallocation of resources from less-productive firms to more-productive ones, on the dynamic path of aggregate output. The results show that the benefits of restructuring could substantially exceed the costs.

This book focuses on various business practices to manage ailing companies during economic depression or in the aftermath of man-made and natural disasters. The methods implemented by various Japanese enterprises, such as Japan Air Line, Tokyo Electricity Company, Nissan and Toyota, to overcome their challenges are elaborated in this book. The scope of the book covers: restructuring under government financial support; private turnaround management of huge conglomerates; reorganization of business domains; accounting for risk management, and robust supply chain management in the aftermath of disasters.