While the recent “Big Bang” reform fundamentally aims at enhancing market competition in the financial sector, the Japanese competition authority, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC), seems to be rather reluctant to participate in relevant discussions. The present paper focuses on this aspect,...

The paper shows that between the late 1980s and 1997, the year when Korea was engulfed in a financial crisis, its corporate-sector profitability was on a decreasing trend, albeit short-term ups and downs. The evidence presented in the paper suggests that Korea’s corporate and financial sectors...

In 1998, Britain carried out the reform of competition policy legislation, which was the largest in the past twenty-five years. This paper examines the policy-making process leading to that reform and discusses the factors driving the movement. Since the original nationally-specific system was...

Japan's Science City projects are examined in this paper to find the extent that they promote catalytic mechanisms within their communities. It is arguable that the concept of a Science City is little more than a theme for funneling public funds into infrastructural development in support of...

National and private universities in Japan differ in several ways, but perhaps the most notable distinction is that national universities are generally viewed as providing higher quality of education in comparison to private universities. This view is rooted in the history and the foundations...

Japan and the Nordic countries similarly experienced a serious collapse of the Bubble economy in the early 1990s, but the financial recovery of the former is extremely delayed compared with the latter. In Japan, the Ministry of Finance is often accused of this, with the claim that it has acted...

This paper examines the development of Japanese competition policy in the 1990s. While there are certain signs of Japan’s transition to more stringent competition policy largely as the result of the Structural Impediment Initiative with the United States in 1989, they should not be understood...

"Investor Relations" has become one of the most fashionable phrases among Japanese companies in recent years, particularly as a result of the rising impact of foreign investors in Japan. An English-language website may be one of the most effective measures for providing corporate information to...

This paper re-examines the relation between regional integration and trade by using the framework suggested by Yeats [1998] to analyze the effects of European integration. We identify the industries that experienced the largest increases in regional trade orientation during three phases of...

This paper explores the determinants of innovative capability in a sample of multinational company (MNC) subsidiaries in four transition economies: Estonia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovenia. It finds that capability in product and process technology appears to be determined by a different set of...