>Doug wrote:
>>.....Back in the 1980s, it was said that Japan was cleverly
>>ignoring short-term profit consideration in favor of a long-term
>>strategy of building market share; that didn't work out too good.
>
>
>Interesting. Anybody you know written about Japan from this perspective?
The market share argument was ubiquitous. There was a two-volume collection on the Political Economy of Japan that came out in the late 1980s, from Stanford University Press I think, that had a paper in it arguing that the rate of return on new investment in Japan in the 1980s was zero or even negative. The books are at home and I'm not. I'll look for a fuller cite tomorrow.
Doug