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JapAnglo-Saxon capitalism

Nov 29th 2007


Have Japanese business practices changed enough?

TO AN observer watching a Toyota Prius drive by, the car's hybrid propulsion system is invisible, but its improved performance shows up clearly in its fuel-consumption figures. The same applies to Japan's new hybrid industrial model. Outsiders cannot always tell how much a particular company has changed the way it does things. But the improvement in Japan's economic performance is clear, and at least some of it is due to the adoption of the hybrid model.

Japan has both embraced and rejected American capitalism,” observes Mr Vogel of the University of California, Berkeley. Having identified the American style of capitalism as a possible model, Japan's business leaders were highly selective about which aspects of it to adopt, he says. Under the resulting hybrid model, Japanese companies may well maintain close co-operation with employees yet at the same time profess support for shareholder value; remain committed to lifetime employment but also offer merit-based pay and share options; and engage more fully with the global economy yet keep certain activities in Japan and replicate some Japanese practices even in foreign markets.








How prevalent is the hybrid model? Gregory Jackson, an expert on international comparisons of corporate governance at King's College London, and Hideaki Miyajima of Waseda University analysed data on 723 Japanese companies gathered by the finance ministry and identified three clusters: 24% had adopted hybrid models; 42% were traditional Japanese firms; and the other 34% were somewhere in-between.







Of the firms with hybrid models, 94% offered lifetime employment, 45% merit-based pay and 39% employee stock options. These companies were more likely to have outsiders on the boards than traditional firms, made more use of corporate bonds as a source of finance and less use of banks, and had a high level of foreign or institutional share ownership. This group included many large, internationally oriented firms, such as Toyota, Canon, Yamaha, NTT DoCoMo, Hitachi and Mitsubishi. Toyota, regarded as an archetype of corporate Japan in many respects, is a typical example: it has switched from bank financing to bonds, has a high level of foreign ownership and has introduced stock options. But it remains committed to lifetime employment and has resisted putting outsiders on the board.

All of the traditional Japanese firms offered lifetime employment and none merit-based pay; 19% awarded employee share options. They generally had boards consisting entirely of insiders, relied on bank finance rather than bonds and had few foreigners and institutional investors holding their shares. They were typically involved in industries such as construction, chemicals, textiles, machinery and food. Companies in the third cluster retained traditional ownership and finance structures, but some firms had adopted more market-oriented employment policies. Firms in this group included retailers, technology firms and family-controlled companies in a variety of industries.





On average, notes Mr Jackson, hybrid companies performed significantly better (measured by return on assets) than traditional Japanese firms or those in the intermediate group. Evidently the hybrid model allows firms to bring their distinctive competitive strengths to the wider world. And although they accounted for only 24% of Japanese firms, this included a disproportionate number of Japan's industrial giants, so the hybrid cluster accounted for 67% of the workforce.

This raises the question of how stable the hybrid model is, and whether it is just a step on the way to a total embrace of the Anglo-Saxon model. Mr Jackson points out that the number of companies introducing the American-style committee system has begun to slow and the debate on corporate-board reform has cooled. Now that the economy has started to recover, the decline in cross-shareholdings has halted and even gone into reverse. All of this, he suggests, implies that the hybrid model is stable, and will not prove to be just a halfway house on the way to an American model.

Halfway to America

Look at the Toyota Prius again. Its hybrid design is also being refined. The next version, due in 2010, will be a “plug-in” hybrid with a better battery pack that will be able to make short trips entirely on electric power. Toyota's Mr Cho says he has recently ridden in a prototype, “and believe me, it's wonderful.” The hybrid design will also form the basis of cars powered by fuel cells. To be sure, some people think cars should simply go all-electric, just as some people think that Japan should go all-American. But there are plenty, too, who believe that the future is hybrid.


Masahiko Aoki, Gregory Jackson, Hideaki Miyajima
Corporate Governance in Japan: Institutional Change and Organizational Diversity