Where will systemic change lead? This book offers fresh insights by collecting Japanese and German contributions to this scholarly discussion both from theoretical and empirical viewpoints.

After the devastation of World War II, Germany and Japan built national capitalist institutions that were remarkably successful in terms of national reconstruction and international competitiveness. Yet both "miracles" have since faltered, allowing U.S. capital and its institutional forms to establish global dominance. National varieties of capitalism are now under intense pressure to converge to the U.S. model. Kozo Yamamura and Wolfgang Streeck have gathered an international group of authors to examine the likelihood of convergence—to determine whether the global forces of Anglo-American capitalism will give rise to a single, homogeneous capitalist system. The chapters in this volume approach this question from five directions: international integration, technological innovation, labor relations and production systems, financial regimes and corporate governance, and domestic politics. In their introduction, Yamamura and Streeck summarize the crises of performance and confidence that have beset German and Japanese capitalism and revived the question of competitive convergence. The editors ask whether the two countries, confronted with the political and economic exigencies of technological revolution and economic internationalization, must abandon their distinctive institutions and the competitive advantages these have yielded in the past, or whether they can adapt and retain such institutions, thereby preserving the social cohesion and economic competitiveness of their societies.

Early transition was characterized by debate over shock therapy and gradualism as alternative reform strategies. Other important debates concerned the nature of the former USSR. Was it ever Socialist and what were its laws of motion? What implications does the old system have for the course of post-communist reforms? These are among the key issues analysed in this book, through a mix of conceptual analysis and an interesting selection of country studies.

Institutional and technological change is a highly topical subject. At the theoretical level, there is much debate in the field of institutional economics about the role of technological change in endogenous growth theory. At a practical policy level, arguments rage about how Japan and the Japanese economy should plan for the future. In this book, leading economists and economic historians of Japan examine a range of key issues concerning institutional and technological change in Japan, rigorously using discipline-based tools of analysis, and drawing important conclusions as to how the process of change in these areas actually works. In applying these ideas to Japan, the writers in this volume are focusing on an issue which is currently being much debated in the country itself, and are helping our understanding of the world’s second-largest economy.

The aim of this book is to evaluate accurately economic development mechanism and to extract valuable lessons from a comparison of the economic development of Japan and that of Germany. The book covers an extensive range of economic issues: (1) macro-economic factors: capital, labor, technology; (2) macro-economic policies: financial, monetary, industrial; (3) external shocks to both economies: oil crises, exchange rate fluctuations, environmental problems; (4) development processes of major industries: steel, chemicals, and automobiles. The analyses with this systematic and comprehensive approach provide useful insights for the general reader as well as guidelines for developing countries and for Eastern European countries in transition.

The book begins with an editors' introduction that provides a conceptual setting for a comparative study of the role of policy in the development of the postwar Japanese and West German economies. It then offers detailed comparative analyses of developments in the two countries on seven substantive topics: an overview of macroeconomic change; economic advisory and planning; monetary control; inflation control; labour markets and wage determination; agriculture and social security and welfare. It ends with an editor's summary and conclusion.

In the 1980s the performance of Japan’s economy was an international success story, and led many economists to suggest that the 1990s would be a Japanese decade. Today, however, the dominant view is that Japan is inescapably on a downward slope. Rather than focusing on the evolution of the performance of Japanese capitalism, this book reflects on the changes that it has experienced over the past 30 years, and presents a comprehensive analysis of the great transformation of Japanese capitalism from the heights of the 1980s, through the lost decades of the 1990s, and well into the 21st century. This book posits an alternative analysis of the Japanese economic trajectory since the early 1980s, and argues that whereas policies inspired by neo-liberalism have been presented as a solution to the Japanese crisis, these policies have in fact been one of the causes of the problems that Japan has faced over the past 30 years. Crucially, this book seeks to understand the institutional and organisational changes that have characterised Japanese capitalism since the 1980s, and to highlight in comparative perspective, with reference to the ‘neo-liberal moment’, the nature of the transformation of Japanese capitalism. Indeed, the arguments presented in this book go well beyond Japan itself, and examine the diversity of capitalism, notably in continental Europe, which has experienced problems that in many ways are also comparable to those of Japan. The Great Transformation of Japanese Capitalism will appeal to students and scholars of both Japanese politics and economics, as well as those interested in comparative political economy.