This book focuses on the so-called Golden Age of Capitalism' the 1950s and 1960s, and studying prime-mover countries (the US and the UK), followers (Germany, France, and Italy), and latecomers (Japan and Korea). It addresses the crucial questions to be asked; what appropriate roles should government be assigned, and which government actions are useful public policy and which represent unnecessary and harmful intervention?

This book uses comparative institutional analysis to explain differences in national economic performance. Countries have their own rules for corporate governance and they have different market arrangements; and these differences in rules and organization affect the way firms behave. Countries also tend to develop conventions of organizational architechture of firms, whether their hierarchies are functional, horizontal, or decentralized. This affects the way in which they process information, and information management is increasingly seen as being of crucial importance to a firm's...

This work provides a survey of the many changes currently in progress in Japan, including political reform, economic deregulation and liberalization, and reforms to environmental policy, science and technology, education, and immigration policy.

Debates regarding corporate governance have become increasingly important in Japan as the post-war model of bank-based, stakeholder-oriented corporate governance faces the new pressures associated with globalization and growing investor demands for shareholder value. Bringing together a group of leading scholars from economics, law, sociology and management studies, this book looks at how the Japanese approach to corporate governance and the firm have changed in the post-bubble era. The contributions offer a unique empirical exploration of why and how Japanese firms are reshaping their...