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Sébastien Lechevalier, The great transformation of Japanese capitalism

After more than two decades of poor growth performance, Japan seems no longer a model worth studying. However, the assumption that only successful economies are able to provide useful insights is misleading. The question of how Japan’s economic system, that had been working so well from the 1950s to the 1980s, could suddenly stall and fall behind is not only central for our understanding of the limitations inherent in the factors and mechanisms of the country’s past success. Respective findings might as well be relevant for present and future high growth economies elsewhere. Explanations offered in the literature on why Japan’s system ‘soured’ (Katz, 1998) typically apply a two-step argument. The first step emphasizes fundamental changes in the macroenvironment: first, the fast and successful completion of economic and technological catchup promoting Japan from a follower to a leader in many fields of technology and confronting it with increasingly saturated markets at home and fiercer competition from abroad; second, changes in the economic environment affecting basically all advanced economies, like globalization, the rise of South-East Asia and China, and new technologies and business models brought about by advances in ICT and the Internet; third, domestic developments like the boom and bust of the bubble economy between 1986 and 1991 and the rapid aging and recent decline of the population that Japan does share with some, but not all other countries. In the second step, it is argued that Japan’s peculiar institutional set-up, comprising the employment system, the financial system, industrial organization as well as the interplay between politicians, bureaucrats and firms, which worked perfectly during economic and technological catch-up, did not fit well to the new macro-environment, and political and business leaders were unwilling or unable to implement the reforms necessary to adjust the system swiftly and adequately. Variants of the argument differ with respect to the aspects of change they emphasize and the parts of the system they focus on. The Great Transformation of Japanese Capitalism embraces the ‘ingredients’ of the standard argument, i.e. the changes in the macro-environment and the specifics of Japan’s institutional set-up. However, the authors develop a distinct line of reasoning by introducing an additional independent factor, namely ‘neoliberal reforms,’ and by assigning it a decisive explanatory power. ‘Neoliberal reforms’ are seen as the vital element for understanding what happened in Japan over the last 30 years, and regarded as a fundamental cause for why things developed for the worse in many areas. The book includes a somewhat lengthy foreword by Robert Boyer reviewing French research on the Japanese economy and touching upon several of the topics analyzed in later chapters, such as labor relations, financial liberalization, innovation system and internationalization. The main chapters, most of them written by Sébastien Lechevalier, address