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.

Japan rose from the ashes of defeat in WW2 to become one of the world's leading economies. With economic reform again at the top of the global agenda, this book examines the lessons to be learned from Japan's economic recovery.

During the rapid growth period of the Japanese economy, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, the economic system that became entrenched in Japan -- the so-called Japanese-style capitalism -- was based on the government-business-bureaucracy triad. Although its distinct features survived the subsequent two decades of slow growth, there are many indications that the Japanese economy is once again struggling to transform itself. These translations from the Japanese economic literature expertly address this transformation.

After two decades of reinvention, Japanese companies are re-emerging as major players in the new digital economy. They have responded to the rise of China and new global competition by moving upstream into critical deep-tech inputs and advanced materials and components. This new "aggregate niche strategy" has made Japan the technology anchor for many global supply chains. Although the end products do not carry a "Japan Inside" label, Japan plays a pivotal role in our everyday lives across many critical industries. This book is an in-depth exploration of current Japanese business strategies that make Japan the world's third-largest economy and an economic leader in Asia. To accomplish their reinvention, Japan's largest companies are building new processes of breakthrough innovation. Central to this book is how they are addressing the necessary changes in organizational design, internal management processes, employment, and corporate governance. Because Japan values social stability and economic equality, this reinvention is happening slowly and methodically, and has gone largely unnoticed by Western observers. Yet, Japan's more balanced model of "caring capitalism" is both competitive and transformative, and more socially responsible than the unbridled growth approach of the United States.

Monograph on the economic system of Japan - describes the economic geography and human geography, political system and society, government, educational system, business organizations and decision making, employment and labour relations, industrial policy and structure, financing, banking and monetary policy, fiscal policy, etc. Diagrams, references and statistical tables.

The book also includes a valuable evaluation of the performance of the Japanese economic system in terms of not only the growth of GDP, but also income distribution." "Juro Teranishi's book will appeal to scholars and students of the Japanese economy, institutional and financial economics, and corporate governance."--Jacket.

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.

After seven long years of economic malaise, it is clear that something has gone awry in Japan. Unless Japan undertakes sweeping reform, official forecasts now warn, growth will steadily dwindle. How could the world's most acclaimed economic miracle have stumbled so badly? As this important book explains, the root of the problem is that Japan is still mired in the structures, policies, and mental habits of the 1950s-1960s. Four decades ago while in the "catch-up" phase of its economic evolution, policies that gave rise to "Japan, Inc". made a lot of sense. By the 1970s and 1980s, when Japan had become a more mature economy, "catch-up economics" had become passe, even counterproductive. Even worse, in response to the oil shocks, Japan increasingly used its industrial policy tools. not to promote "winners", but to shield "losers" from competition at home and abroad. Japan's well-known aversion to imports is part and parcel of this politically understandable, but economically self-defeating, pattern. The end result is a deformed "dual economy" unique in the industrial world. Now this "dualism" is sapping the strength of the entire economy. The protection of the weak is driving Japan's most inefficient companies to invest offshore instead of at home. Without sweeping reform, real recovery will prove elusive. The challenging thesis articulated in this book is receiving widespread media attention in the United States and Japan and is sure to provoke continuing debate and controversy.