ABSTRACT
By the end of the 1980s, the J-system had become highly respected. Japanese firms became technology leaders in various industries and served as role models for the rest of the world. But following the ‘economic miracle’, Japan entered a long period of sluggish growth, with increasing unemployment rates, culminating in the so-called ‘lost decade’ and leading to a broad scepticism about Japan’s economic future. A prominent hypothesis promulgated in the literature as an explanation for Japan’s decay is the ‘mismatch-hypothesis’: this proposes that the basic structure of Japan’s innovation system is trapped in its ‘developmental state’ – characterized by a distinct innovation pattern and respective supporting institutions – and does not fit to the needs of a ‘frontier economy’. Table 4.1 lists some contributions to the literature that emphasize the comparative disadvantages of the Japanese innovation system due to its lock-in type character. 1 It has been claimed that the J-system seems less appropriate for meeting new technological challenges and for benefiting economically from novel scientific breakthroughs in a variety of domains (official statistics indeed reflect comparative disadvantages in some high-tech industries and cutting-edge technologies such as biotechnology or IT, see Chapter 1). The ‘mismatch-hypothesis’ seemed further confirmed by the fact that in contrast to the USA, Japan did not experience an IT-driven productivity growth in the late 1990s, so that it appeared that the new economy had not taken off in Japan (this has changed recently, but spurred discussion in the 1990s; see Fueki and Kawamoto 2009, and also Chapter 1). More specifically, Japan’s focus on applied research, its personalized university–industry linkages, its lack of open labour markets, underdeveloped venture capital markets and the dominance of integral product architectures as well as the lack of an entrepreneurial spirit have been identified as reasons for the country’s failure to contribute to the new economy. The ‘mismatch hypothesis': Selected literature on comparative disadvantages of the Japanese innovation system https://www.niso.org/standards/z39-96/ns/oasis-exchange/table">
Author
Title
Anchordoguy, M. (2000)
‘Japan’s software industry: a failure of institutions’, Research Policy, 29: 391–408.
Boltho, A. and Corbett, J. (2000)
‘The assessment: Japan’s stagnation – can policy revive the economy?’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 16(2): 1–17.
Collinson, S. and Wilson, D.C. (2006)
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Lincoln, E. (1988)
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Oniki, H. (1998)
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Ratliff, J.M. (2004)
‘The persistence of national differences in a globalizing world: the Japanese struggle for competitiveness in advanced information technologies’, The Journal of Socio-Economics, 33(1): 71–88.
