Institutional and technological change in Japan's economy : past and present

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 world's second-largest economy.

1. Introduction: Economic and Institutional Change in Japan 2. Technology and Change in Japan's 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. Japan's 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