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...

One of the curiosities about the Japanese banking sector for Westerners is the close connection between banks and the financial authority, namely Ministry of Finance (MoF). One of the important sources of this connection is the practice called amakudari. Amakudari symbolizes the practice under...

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,...

"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...

Following the US and Europe, Japan is now becoming aware of the importance of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). In fact, Japan has become the country with the largest number of participants in Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), which is currently the most acknowledged reporting system of...

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...

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...

This paper examines a number of traditional characteristics of the Swedish welfare state, and discusses how they have been changed over time, especially since the economic crisis in the early 1990s. It emphasizes that the country did not only suffer from the economic crisis and recent...

Ten years have passed since the Swedish government widely encouraged its municipalities to marketize their elderly care services. There has been a long-standing discussion on the benefit of marketization during that period, but most of the discussions were developed from the case studies of a...

Amakudari, or the reemployment of the officials retired from the government into senior management positions in private companies, is one of the informal institutions most frequently mentioned in the literature of Japanese political economy. However, few studies have examined it systematically....