While Americans enjoy competitive prices for products imported from Japan, Japanese consumers often pay high prices for the same goods. How do Japanese industries manage to export heavily, keep prices high at home, and limit cheap imports into their own markets? Trade associations play a key role in Japan's political economy, Mark Tilton argues. They provide informal market governance that maintains high domestic prices and in some cases directly blocks foreign-made commodities. Tilton profiles the cement, aluminum, steel, and petrochemical industries. He contends that informal producer...

Deregulation has been at the top of Japan's economic policy agenda for many years. Now, in the midst of a financial crisis that engulfs all of Asia, pressures on the Japanese government for substantial reform - coming from both inside and outside forces - are stronger than ever. But is Japan actually making the changes necessary to reduce market controls, encourage competition, and create new opportunities for imports? To most outside observers, regulatory reform in Japan is an incomprehensible blur of grandiose proposals and byzantine political maneuvering, which masks developments that...