After the global financial crisis, the Japanese government enacted the Financing Facilitation Act in 2009 to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that had fallen into unprofitable conditions. Under this law, when troubled debtors asked financial institutions to ease repayment...

Benchmarking can be described as an alliance between partners to share information on practices, processes and measures that will stimulate innovative practices within a company, leading to improvement in corporate performance. As a process of finding and implementing best practices, it...