The government's role in Japanese and Korean credit markets : a new institutional economics perspective

The authors discuss the effectiveness of credit policies in the early stages of economic development in Japan and Korea. They examine the importance of institutional arrangements for managing credit policies in the two countries. They emphasize participatory government intervention, wherein credit policies could be viewed as part of an internal allocation mechanism: government, banks, and large industrial firms may be said to have formed what the authors call a"government led internal organization"(GLIO). They examine the theoretical foundations for this view and discuss the implications for the efficiency of credit allocations. They argue that in early economic development such a participatory approach may have helped overcome pervasive market imperfections. But there were also significant dangers: problems of entrenched interests and institutional inertia. In both countries, the relative importance of GLIO gradually diminished as competitive capital markets and large conglomerates ("privately led internal government organizations") expanded with economic growth.