Japan and Japanese firms: historical and modern lessons for international business and economic development

The obsession in both the popular and academic press about Japan, Japanese firms and their management practices lasted until the 1990s, after which there has been an inexplicable absence of curiosity. I argue here that there is still much to learn, not only from their contemporary activity, but from their historical actions. Less developed countries, in particular, can benefit from a careful study of the Meiji era, during which Japan built up the structure, institutions and organizations that underlay its economic success for much of the 20th century, and was a blueprint for many Asian success stories. The Meiji period was crucial in building up of Japan’s location advantages, and the rapidity of the reforms in this period underlined much of its subsequent growth. I also argue that despite Japan’s economic stagnation since the 1990s, its firms have not been stationary. There has been considerable evolution in the management and structure of Japanese firms and its innovation system. Such developments represent a useful preview of challenges ahead for the more advanced emerging economies such as China and India, as well as newer advanced economies, such as Korea

A survey of simulation techniques in commerce and defence

Despite the developments in Modelling and Simulation (M&S) tools and techniques over the past years, there has been a gap in the M&S research and practice in healthcare on developing a toolkit to assist the modellers and simulation practitioners with selecting an appropriate set of techniques. This study is a preliminary step towards this goal. This paper presents some results from a systematic literature survey on applications of M&S in the commerce and defence domains that could inspire some improvements in the healthcare. Interim results show that in the commercial sector Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) has been the most widely used technique with System Dynamics (SD) in second place. However in the defence sector, SD has gained relatively more attention. SD has been found quite useful for qualitative and soft factors analysis. From both the surveys it becomes clear that there is a growing trend towards using hybrid M&S approaches

Interest Rate Pass-Through in New EU Member States: The Case of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland

The characteristics of the interest rate pass-through in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland are studied making use of autoregressive distributed lags (ARDL) models. Significant differences are found across market interest rates and countries concerning long-run elasticities of market interest rates to changes in the key policy rate. While the null hypothesis of complete pass-through cannot be rejected for any interest rate in Poland, deviations from complete pass-through are present for several interest rates in the Czech Republic and Hungary. Except for the case of the short-term loan rate for enterprises in Hungary, no significant deviation from symmetry in the speed of adjustment to equilibrium is found in the data.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40057/3/wp671.pd