Institutional and technological change is a highly topical subject. At the theoretical level, there is much debate in the field of institutional economics about the role of technological change in endogenous growth theory. At a practical policy level, arguments rage about how Japan and the Japanese economy should plan for the future.
In this book, leading economists and economic historians of Japan examine a range of key issues concerning institutional and technological change in Japan, rigorously using discipline-based tools of analysis, and drawing important conclusions as to how the process of change in these areas actually works.
In applying these ideas to Japan, the writers in this volume are focusing on an issue which is currently being much debated in the country itself, and are helping our understanding of the worlds second-largest economy.
1. Introduction: Economic and Institutional Change in Japan
2.
Technology and Change in Japans Modern Copper Mining Industry
3.
Professionalism as Power: Tajiri Inajiro and the Modernisation of Meiji
Finance
4. Investment, Adaptation and Innovation: Genesis and Growth of Beer
Corporations in Prewar Japan
5. Managing Female Textile Workers: an Industry
in Transition, 1945-1975
6. Japans Industrial Organisation in Motion:
Keiretsu at the Turning Point
7. Global Finance, Democracy and the State in
Japan
8. Changes and Crisis in the Japanese Banking Industry
9. International
Mergers and Acquisitions with Japanese Participation: Two Cases from the
Automotive Industry
10. Environmental Protection and the Impact of
Institutional Change
11. Changes in Conducting Foresight in Japan
Janet Hunter is Saji Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has published widely on modern Japanese economic history, particularly on the development of the female labour market, and is working on a history of the countrys communications.
Cornelia Storz is Professor of Japanese Economics at the Faculty of Economics and the Centre for Japanese Studies, University of Marburg. Her research focuses on the comparison of economic systems; genesis and change in institutions (especially institutional change in Japan); comparative institutional analysis; entrepreneurship and the modern Japanese economy.