ABSTRACT
This statement, with which Kent Calder begins his chapter on ‘Small business policy,’ reflects the dominant academic view of Japanese small business policy. Coupled with the following three facts, this view often leads scholars to conclude that small business policies have played a tremendously important role in the economic development of Japan: (1) the pace of economic development in Japan has indeed been rapid; (2) the role of the government has appeared to be significant; and (3) small enterprises are thought to have contributed much to Japanese economic development. Because of this academic focus on small business policy, governments and development strategists particularly in transitional economies and in developing economies have now become interested in Japanese small business policies as lessons for their own planning strategies.113 Learning about Japanese small business policy, people in the governments of transitional economies ask: ‘How did such a huge number of active small businesses come into being?’ ‘What were the conditions for their creation?’ ‘How did government policy contribute to their success?’ ‘What were effective policies?’ They would thus receive the following message with surprise and disappointment: in Japan the government has consistently suffered from an ‘excessive’ number of small businesses, and how to create small businesses has never been a policy issue. Accordingly, we can draw no lessons for creating small businesses from the Japanese experience (Miwa 1995, 1999).
