Mark Tilton

Is Japan really changing its ways? : regulatory reform and the Japanese economy

Deregulation has been at the top of Japans economic policy agenda for many years. Now, in the midst of a financial crisis that engulfs all of Asia, pressures on the Japanese government for substantial reform - coming from both inside and outside forces - are stronger than ever. But is Japan actually making the changes necessary to reduce market controls, encourage competition, and create new opportunities for imports? To most outside observers, regulatory reform in Japan is an incomprehensible blur of grandiose proposals and byzantine political maneuvering, which masks developments that could be of tremendous significance to the world at large. In this book, experts from the United States and Japan cut through the fog that surrounds Japanese regulatory reform. They review the characteristics of Japanese regulation and analyze the content of regulatory reforms proposed to date as well as the political dynamics that shaped them. The book also examines the nuts-and-bolts issues of reforms in major economic sectors and the implications of deregulation for access to Japanese markets for foreign imports. By focusing on both the larger political, economic, and strategic contexts and on the way in which the micro and macro aspects of regulatory reform are interconnected, this volume makes comprehensible the tidal wave of proposals and posturing coming out of Japan. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Miyajima Hideaki, Elizabeth Norville, Kosuke Oyama, and Yul Sohn. Lonny E. Carlile is an assistant professor of Japanese Studies in the Center for Japanese Studies/Department of Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Mark C. Tilton is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Purdue University.

Seeds of an Asian European Union? Regionalism as a hedge against the United States on telecommunications technology in Japan and Germany

Abstract Germany and Japan have both used regionalism as a hedge against American power in the area of telecommunications, but this strategy has taken very different forms. Germanys regionalism is within the European Union. Since 2002 Japan has developed an ad hoc technology alliance in telecommunications with China and South Korea. Both the European Union and Northeast Asian countries have used industrial policy to promote telecommunications technology and both regional organizations have expressed concern about American dominance in telecommunications. Both Germany and Japan have looked to their lower income neighboring countries for investment opportunities in telecommunications, but each has taken a different approach. Japanese telecommunications firms have not been very successful in investing in other countries or in exporting Japans very sophisticated and expensive telecommunications equipment. The Japanese government and business organizations have taken the lead in trying to promote joint research and pursue development of joint standards. Germanys Deutsche Telekom has been much more active than Japanese firms in international investment. The European Union differs from the Northeast Asian group in that it has pressed Germany to keep its domestic telecommunications market open and to make Deutsche Telekom compete internationally. It is surprising that China, Japan and South Korea have reached out to each other to cooperate on technology and standards development despite longstanding mutual antagonisms. The Northeast Asian agreements on telecommunications recall the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) of 1952, an initiative that also sought to link economically states divided by deep resentments. Like the ECSC, the current Asian initiative targets some of the most important economic sectors of the day. However, strong market pressures tend to undermine cooperation, and it is uncertain how much impact the agreements on telecommunications will really have.

Informal market governance in Japan's basic materials industries

Too much emphasis has been placed on formal state policies and on ties between individual firms to explain Japanese economic behavior and impediments to imports in Japanese markets. We need to look instead at informal governance by trade associations. In so doing, the concept of relational contracting should be applied not just to dyadic relationships between individual firms but also to relationships between entire industries. Whole industries engage in relational contracting to ensure the stability of both prices and supplies. These industry agreements stabilize Japanese markets but at the same time keep imports out of them. This informal governance complements state policies to support uncompetitive industries. These agreements are more likely to occur and succeed between selling and buying industries that each are relatively concentrated, when upstream products are standardized, when upstream goods constitute a smaller share of downstream production costs, when these sectors have not experienced previous conflicts that undermine cooperation, and when the Ministry of International Trade and Industry wants a domestic supply of its products.

Antitrust policy and Japan's international steel trade

This paper was presented as part of a workshop, The Changing Japanese Firm, Dec 11-12, 1998 at Columbia University. The workshop was sponsored by the Center on Japanese Economy and Business, Columbia Business School, with additional financial support from The Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business, Columbia Business School and the Center for International Business Education, Columbia University.

Japan's Managed Globalization: Adapting to the Twenty-First Century (review)

Hart and Hatch discuss this more recent change, although little or none of this reversal comes through in either the opening or concluding essay by the editors. Meanwhile, the bilateral economic relationship has been affected by the continuing rise of China. Mochizuki’s chapter on China focuses on security and diplomatic issues, but today one would expect either a different emphasis or perhaps a separate chapter on economic China. For both countries, trade ties with China have grown in relative importance, with both Japan and the United States now importing more from China than from each other. China’s economic emergence may fit well with the thesis of this volume, although it may provide reasons to enhance the bilateral relationship since both governments have some common interests in getting the Chinese government to enforce its commitments as a member of the WTO. Where does all this leave us? At the broadest level of generality, the hypothesis of this book remains intact but it is not as obvious as at first blush. In the past the bilateral relationship was not necessarily as dominant as implied; both governments have engaged the world outside their bilateral relationship for years simply because they are two sovereign governments with global interests. To be sure, some obvious changes have occurred, particularly since the late 1980s, that make Asian regional or global issues more salient for both governments relative to the bilateral relationship than in the past. Economically, the rapid growth of China and other parts of Asia means that non-Japan Asia has gradually loomed larger relative to the other bilateral partner for both governments. On the security front, Japanese society has edged slowly away from its postwar pacifism, and such a drift necessarily brings the government into greater engagement with multilateral discussions and issues. But much of the analysis in this book leaves a strong impression of the strength and durability of a bilateral focus on the part of the Japanese government, and events since 2001 tend to support this conclusion.