Industrial Policy in Japan during the Postwar Boom. Business, Government and International Technology Transfer 1955-1973

这个项目从市场参与者的角度考察了日本国际贸易产业省(MITI)在高增长时期(1955-1973)的产业政策。我们解决了文献中需要这样一个新视角的三个空白：1.工业和信息化部主要使用被称为“行政指导”的非正式方法来实施其产业政策。这些方法的应用通常是口服的，但没有正式的文件记录。因此，详细描述这类方法使用情况的档案资料很少见。因此，人们对产业政策是如何在微观层面实施的知之甚少。2.现有的研究分析了宏观层面的产业政策，即国家经济或特定经济部门的层面。此外，他们主要使用在公司背景之外创造的消息来源。因此，他们在很大程度上忽视了公司及其员工在产业政策实施中究竟扮演了什么角色的问题。3.关于日本产业政策的核心究竟是什么，目前还没有达成共识。这就是为什么人们对其对经济增长和结构变化的影响有截然不同的解读的原因之一。这一术语的现有定义的一个主要缺陷是，它们没有充分考虑工信部的非正式方法或公司的行动。我们能够在业务档案中发现内部公司文档，这些文档允许对前两个问题进行基于来源的检查。根据这次检查的结果，我们将重新概念化日本的产业政策。这种方法使我们能够重新评估产业投资省对日本经济奇迹的贡献。我们的核心假设是，产业政策的影响主要不是基于正式或非正式的政策工具，而是间接和熟练地操纵个别市场参与者的预期和决策。由于外国技术对日本经济增长的重要性，我们将集中精力采取MITI行动，以促进技术转让。

This project examines the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry‘s (MITI) industrial policy during the High Growth Period (1955-1973) from the perspective of market actors. We address three gaps in the literature that require such a new perspective:1. MITI primarily employed informal methods known as "administrative guidance" to implement its industrial policy. The application of these methods, which were often used orally, was not officially documented. Hence, archival sources describing the use of such methods in a detailed manner are rare. For this reason, there is little knowledge how industrial policy was put into effect at the micro-level. 2. Existing studies have analyzed industrial policy at the macro-level, i.e. the level of the national economy or specific sectors of the economy. Furthermore, they used mainly sources created outside the context of the firm. Therefore, they largely ignored the question of what role companies and their employees actually played for the implementation of industrial policy. 3. There is no consensus on what really was at the core of Japanese industrial policy. This is one of the reasons why its effects on economic growth and structural change have been interpreted very differently. A major shortcoming of established definitions of the term is that they do not sufficiently account for MITI’s informal methods or the actions of companies. We were able to discover internal firm documents in business archives that allow for a source-based examination of the first two problems. Based on the results of this examination, we will re-conceptualize Japanese industrial policy. This approach enables us to reevaluate MITI’s contribution to the Japanese economic miracle.Our central hypothesis is that impact of industrial policy is not primarily based on formal or informal policy tools, but rather in the indirect and skillful manipulations of expectations and decisions of individual market actors. Because of the importance of foreign technology for Japan’s economic growth, we will concentrate on MITI action toward the promotion of technology transfer.