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Japanese Capitalism in Crisis: A Regulationist Interpretation. Edited by Robert Boyer and Toshio Yamada. London, New York: Routledge, 2000. 239 pp. $90.00. ISBN 0-- 415-20559-X.
In the 1980s, Japan burst onto the global scene as a formidable economic power. Experts predicted that it would dominate every industry from steel, automobiles and television sets to semiconductors and computers. For a substantial time that forecast appeared accurate; Japan was the envy of the industrialized West. In the 1990s, however, Japan limped through its worst economic performance since the end of WW II.
This volume argues that the "lost decade" stems from a crisis in Japanese capitalism, and it analyzes the nature and causes of the crisis using regulation theory. Regulation theory employs three principles to analyze the crisis. First, it identifies the mode of regulation guiding Japanese postwar development. This consists of five major institutional forms-the wage-labor nexus, monetary and financial relations, interfirm relations, forms of state, and the international regime. Second, it determines the nature of the over-arching mode of regulation that these five institutional forms create. Finally, it identifies the regimes of accumulation or growth generated by the mode of regulation [19].
Part I analyzes the major institutions that...