This article examines the advancement of Japanese telecommunications carriers and equipment producers into Asia. Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT), the leading carrier in Japan, was restricted from entering international markets until recently, and this paper argues that the delay...

This paper provides a survey and a brief critical review of the literature on the widely used gravity models of trade, as a prelude to the justification of its use with the stochastic frontier methodology. The important papers on the theoretical foundations of the gravity model are reviewed and...

In Japan, the sustainability of public finance including that of social security is of serious concern. The underlying cause is that Japan is in transition to a new phase of economy and society because of medium-term changes in the revealed preferences of people about their lifestyle....

This article identifies a number of examples of apparent lack of coherence in United States and European Union trade policies. They include the effect of preferential policies that lock in trade shares and inhibit growth promoting structural adjustment, biases in tariff structures, policies that...

In 1989 a research team from the Australia–Japan Research Centre (AJRC) undertook a study of the prospects for the East Asian steel industry for the 1990s. The aim was to assess the impact of developments in the region on industry strategies in Australia. This paper reviews those projections...

Local governance today is a contested issue worldwide. In the 1990s local or sub-national governance gained greater salience under the forces of globalisation, technological advancement, deregulation and administrative reform - all of which present enormous challenges to local communities and...

In Japan in the 1950s and 1960s the economic objectives for consumers, corporations and the government coincided. Consumers wanted to improve their standard of living, corporations tried to increase their productivity through modernisation and industrialisation and the government attempted to...

This paper analyses the reasons for the competitiveness of Toyota. It focuses on the company’s unique relationship with one partner supplier – Denso – where contingency loss potential is the greatest. A literature review reveals some gaps between the English and Japanese literature. The...

The end of the long process of China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation is in sight. How will entry into the WTO affect China’s economy? The work reviewed in this paper shows that China will gain substantially from WTO accession. It will gain from the reforms that it has committed...

The events of 1993 can be seen to be indicative of a fundamental change in the nature of Japanese politics. In the postwar era Japanese politics can be seen to have been characterised by two competing visions of the polity — ‘the constitutional’ and ‘the bureaucratic’. Each of these...