Japan achieved it's present economic position by rejecting free trade theory and instead mastering neomercantilist policies which target strategic industries for development with a range of government sponsored cartels, subsidies, import barriers and export incentives. These policies stimulated an economic growth rate which averaged ten percent before 1973, and five percent since, rates four and two times greater than America's during the same periods. This book analyzes the policy making process, implementation, successes, occasional shortcomings, and challenges posed by Tokyo's neomercantilist policies toward its trade rivals.

Product Description: This book chronicles how a controversial set of policy assumptions about the Japanese economy, known as revisionism, rose to become the basis of the trade policy approach of the Clinton administration. In the context of growing fear over Japan's increasing economic strength, revisionists argued that Japan represented a distinctive form of capitalism that was inherently closed to imports and that posed a threat to U...read more

Product Description: This book uses a wide range of original Japanese sources to trace important aspects of the history of Japanese economic ideas, in particular, the development of Japan's industrial policy. In contrast to most others who begin their story within the 1930s or after 1945, Sohn goes back to the Meiji era to trace the evolution of Japanese developmental debates, state policies and market strategies involving cartels and small enterprises, city and countryside, and approaches that variously emphasize the market and the role of the state as Japan seeks to position itself in the world and regional economies...read more

Recently, the extent of Japanese export penetration into other Western economies, particularly the USA, has become a matter of great international concern. There have been increasingly strident demands for Japan to reciprocate on imports, for the Japanese market to be 'opened up' and, by some people, for sanctions or a trade war if the Japanese do not respond. This book examines the growth of protectionist sentiment and the Japanese response to it. It examines in detail the debates within Japan and discusses the measures which the Japanese have actually taken, including the voluntary export restraint measure in the motor sector. It concludes that, broadly, the Japanese are indeed responding to world demands for their market to be opened up but that successful exporting to Japan depends equally on efforts by Western companies to service that market, which they have so far been relatively slow to do.

Product Description: The U.S.-Japan Structural Impediments Initiative (SII) was an attempt in which U.S. and Japanese officials tried to solve trade frictions and adjust their economic systems both by creating an international epistemic community and regime and by accelerating domestic structural change through a joint bureaucratic structure (working group) and mutual pressure...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)