This book studies the industrial development of Japan since the mid-nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on how the various industries built technological capabilities. The Japanese were extraordinarily creative in searching out and learning to use modern technologies, and the authors investigate the emergence of entrepreneurs who began new and risky businesses, how the business organizations evolved to cope with changing technological conditions, and how the managers, engineers, and workers acquired organizational and technological skills through technology importation, learning-by-doing, and their own R & D activities. The book investigates the interaction between private entrepreneurial activities and public policy, through a general examination of economic and industrial development, a study of the evolution of management systems, and six industrial case studies: textile, iron and steel, electrical and communications equipment, automobiles, shipbuilding and aircraft, and pharmaceuticals. The authors show how the Japanese government has played an important supportive role in the continuing innovation, without being a substitute for aggressive business enterprise constantly venturing into unfamiliar terrains.

As the first volume of the two-volume Industrial Development in Modern China: Comparisons with Japan that studies the different paths of industrialization and economic modernization between China and Japan, this book analyzes the relationship between technological innovation and economic development in Japan before World War II. The author deploys econometric analysis, multivariate statistical analysis and case studies from different industries to shed light on technological innovation in the Japanese context with particular emphasis on the importance of the patent system. A great deal of new inventions and patents in this period led to fast economic growth in Japan characterized by the simultaneous development of both traditional and modern industries. These insights help reshape the understanding of Japan's economic development and industrial advancement at an early stage and provide pointers to developing countries as to how human capital, social capabilities and thereby technological innovation can figure in economic growth. This volume will appeal to academics of the East Asian economy, development economics and modern economic history as well as general readers interested in the miracle of the Japanese economy as the first to achieve economic development and modernization among non-Western countries.

This book analyzes the relationship between technological innovation and economic development in Japan before World War II. Guan Quan deploys econometric analysis, multivariate statistical analysis and case studies from different industries to shed light on technological innovation in the Japanese context with particular emphasis on the importance of the patent system. A great deal of new inventions and patents in this period led to fast economic growth in Japan characterized by the simultaneous development of both traditional and modern industries. These insights help reshape the understanding of Japan's economic development and industrial advancement at an early stage and provide pointers to developing countries as to how human capital, social capabilities and thereby technological innovation can figure in economic growth. The book will appeal to academics of the East Asian economy, development economics and modern economic history as well as general readers interested in the miracle of the Japanese economy as the first to achieve economic development and modernization among non-Western countries.

The perspectives of technologists, economists, and policymakers are brought together in this volume. It includes chapters dealing with approaches to assessment of technology leadership in the United States and Japan, an evaluation of future impacts of eroding U.S. technological preeminence, an analysis of the changing nature of technology-based global competition, and a discussion of policy options for the United States.

The focus of this book is on the Japanese economic bureaucracy, particularly on the famous Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), as the leading state actor in the economy. Although MITI was not the only important agent affecting the economy, nor was the state as a whole always predominant, I do not want to be overly modest about the importance of this subject. The particular speed, form, and consequences of Japanese economic growth are not intelligible without reference to the contributions of MITI. Collaboration between the state and big business has long been acknowledged as the defining characteristic of the Japanese economic system, but for too long the state's role in this collaboration has been either condemned as overweening or dismissed as merely supportive, without anyone's ever analyzing the matter. The history of MITI is central to the economic and political history of modern Japan. Equally important, however, the methods and achievements of the Japanese economic bureaucracy are central to the continuing debate between advocates of the communist-type command economies and advocates of the Western-type mixed market economies. The fully bureaucratized command economies misallocate resources and stifle initiative; in order to function at all, they must lock up their populations behind iron curtains or other more or less impermeable barriers. The mixed market economies struggle to find ways to intrude politically determined priorities into their market systems without catching a bad case of the "English disease" or being frustrated by the American-type legal sprawl. The Japanese, of course, do not have all the answers. But given the fact that virtually all solutions to any of the critical problems of the late twentieth century--energy supply, environmental protection, technological innovation, and so forth--involve an expansion of official bureaucracy, the particular Japanese priorities and procedures are instructive. At the very least they should forewarn a foreign observer that the Japanese achievements were not won without a price being paid.

Recognizing that a capacity to innovate and commercialize new high-technology products is increasingly a key for the economic growth in the environment of tighter environmental and resource constraints, governments around the world have taken active steps to strengthen their national innovation systems. These steps underscore the belief of these governments that the rising costs and risks associated with new potentially high-payoff technologies, their spillover or externality-generating effects and the growing global competition, require national R&D programs to support the innovations by new and existing high-technology firms within their borders. The National Research Council's Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy (STEP) has embarked on a study of selected foreign innovation programs in comparison with major U.S. programs. The "21st Century Innovation Systems for the United States and Japan: Lessons from a Decade of Change" symposium reviewed government programs and initiatives to support the development of small- and medium-sized enterprises, government-university- industry collaboration and consortia, and the impact of the intellectual property regime on innovation. This book brings together the papers presented at the conference and provides a historical context of the issues discussed at the symposium.

The two-volume book studies the economic and industrial development of Japan and China in modern times and draws distinctions between the different paths of industrialization and economic modernization taken in the two countries, based on statistical materials, quantitative analysis and multivariate statistical analysis. The first volume analyses the relationship between technological innovation and economic development in Japan before World War II and sheds light on technological innovation in the Japanese context with particular emphasis on the importance of the patent system. The second volume studies the basic conditions and overall economic development of industrial development, chiefly during the period of the Republic of China (1912-1949), taking a comparative perspective and bringing the case of modern Japan into the discussion. The book will appeal to academics and general readers interested in economic development and the modern economic history of East Asia, development economics, as well as industrial and technological history.

This book examines industrial policies as well as STI policies in two selected East Asian economies in South Korea and Japan, comparatively. It reviews general and sectoral policies in railway, medical, aviation equipment and electronics.

Commissioned and brought tohgether for the research project by the world-renowned Council on Foreign Relations, the authors have produced an important compendia in applied economics.