Thanks for the reply. Yes the market share argument was ubiquitous (and I did see some of the 'it won't work' material written a decade ago). But - curiously - I haven't seen any recent postmortem. Especially not one that focuses on the market strategy.
What I have seen in the last few years focuses on either the structural weakness that was in the banking sector (solution: we buy it), macro (reflate-so-we-can-export), inflationist (Krugman) and a few allusions (but no studies) to an "over-accumulation" crisis [does Bill Tabb have a book on this?]. It is odd that with all the hubbub a couple of decades ago over Japan's new successful 'market share' strategy, I don't hear of people in 'orthodoxy' giving this the blame for the ultimate stagnation. Of course for the unorthodox, one might stress that the 'market share' strategy was more likely a poor second-best, rationalizing away, for a while, the lack of profits due to deeper problems.
>Paul wrote:
>
>>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
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