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Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the natural monopoly features of infrastructure industries, together with their strategic roles, have been important elements in state intervention. The aim of this paper is to evaluate what relative weight was attached to market failure problems on the one hand and geo-political factors on the other. For the period 1830-1939, how far were geo-political factors stronger than natural monopoly problems in accounting for the scale of intervention in the various countries of the Western World? How far did the policy instruments for security and market failure overlap? Whilst most of the infrastructure sectors are covered - including internal telecommunications, coal, gas, shipping, electricity and water - special attention is devoted to international submarine telegraph tables and railways. The paper concludes by demonstrating strong differences between Britain and USA on the one hand and Continental Europe plus Japan on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japanese firms have a firmly established reputation as influential foreign investors, originating from the surge of foreign direct investment into North America and Europe during the 1980s. This paper examines trends in Japanese corporate behaviour in the United Kingdom, a key investment destination for Japanese firms, over the period 1991 to 2010. Our ‘demographic’ analysis of Japanese firms' investments includes both investment and exit strategies. It is found that Japanese firms have reconfigured their UK presence in response to a rapidly changing market environment, with an enduring proclivity to cluster, notwithstanding government incentives intended to channel investment towards specific regions of the country. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article follows the evolution of biopharmaceutical firms as they bore great uncertainty and risks in their endeavours to commercialise new therapies – through the regenerative medicine industry in the United States, Britain and Japan. Despite its beginnings in the 1970s, regenerative medicines have yet to become a widely accepted form of medicine. A large part of the problem lay with the lack of 'fit' with the broader health context. This article illustrates how the trajectory of the sector was shaped, not only by the nature of the technology, but also by the complex contexts in which firms were embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise in international markets of new, productive Japanese car manufacturers provoked intense world competition, which created serious doubts about the economic sustainability of an industry mostly dominated until the 1970s by European and North-American multinational companies. Ultimately, this crisis provoked a deep transformation of the industry, with consequences that had a permanent impact on European companies in the sector. American and later European manufacturers were successful in lobbying governments to provide protection. Using a rich source of data from the UK, I show that the ‘new trade policy’, voluntary export restraint (VER), placed on Japanese exports of new cars from 1977 to December 1999, was binding. This case study illustrates the strategies used by Japanese manufacturers to gain access to the European market through the UK market via strategic alliances and later through transplant production, against which continental European nation states were unable to fully insulate themselves. It is also shown that the policy had a profound effect on the nature of Japanese products, as Japanese firms responded to the quantity restraints by radically altering the product characteristics of their automobiles and shifting towards larger autos and new goods, to maximise their profits subject to the binding constraint. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reflects on the contributions of the U.S. and Great Britain to Japanese and German corporate governance (CG) after World War II. Although different forms of CG have developed around the world in response to market forces and national culture, serious doubts have been cast on the ability of national governments to influence CG through legal changes. If governments can influence CG significantly, therefore, the most propitious circumstances were likely to occur under military occupation,, when an occupying government is free from any local electoral pressure, and citizens are demoralized and helpless in defeat. It seems appropriate therefore to reflect on the immediate post-World War Two period as potentially a miniature controlled laboratory of social experiment when occupying American and British military governments were in very strong position to reform CG in Japan and Germany in their own images. However, it turns out that, although many of their regulatory changes were subsequently modified and even reversed by domestic governments later restored to power, in some subtle ways, these changes did lay a basis for rapid post-war economic recoveries in Germany and Japan,

The article discusses the strategic assessment of Japanese rise in the cotton textile industry as threat to Lancashire, Great Britain. In 1910-13, Great Britain's exports of cotton piece goods averaged 6,665 million yards or three times the combined exports of the six largest exporters namely, Italy, France, the United States, Germany, Belgium and Japan. The growth of the Japanese cotton industry was maintained during the replacement and replenishment boom of 1918-20. Recognizing the seriousness of the devastating resurgence of Japanese competition, Manchester Chamber of Commerce, Manchester, Great Britain in August 1930 set up a permanent service to monitor Japan's progress and disseminate information about it to the chamber's affiliates. The line of approach to the problem of Japanese competition was to bring the Japanese in the form of representatives of the cotton trade rather than the government in the first instance to the negotiating table, to reach agreement with them on prices and market shares.

This article examines the labor management and the practice of industrial relations in Great Britain, U.S. and Japan. This article draws on the work of Alfred Chandler and his intellectual predecessors and followers in economics, business history, and industrial relations. Such an approach emphasizes markets and firms in a historical context. The Chandler thesis is essentially an argument about the relationship between markets and technologies, firm strategies, and corporate structures. British firms, in particular the family-owned firms that predominated in the British economy, were more conservative. Intent on maintaining family control, they paid less attention to recruiting and training a professional management hierarchy and to developing organizational structures. The nature of British markets has been offered as an alternative explanation. In Britain, the markets were smaller and less dynamic than in the U.S., and therefore, offered fewer opportunities for growth and organizational innovation. In the case of Japan, a number of large enterprises emerged in the late 19th century and early 20th century to take advantage of domestic markets. At the same time a few of these firms developed overseas markets, especially in East and South-east Asia. The Chandler thesis holds that both markets and organizational arrangements are important driving forces explaining the behavior and performance of the corporate economy.