IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/mes/jpneco/v30y2002i3p3-45.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A Reconsideration of the Rationale for Bank-Centered Economic Systems and the Effectiveness of Directed Credit Policies in the Light of Japanese Evidence

Author

Listed:
  • Richard Werner

Abstract

Directed credit is seen by recent literature as having contributed to high post-war economic growth in several Asian countries, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Indonesia. Its use, however, remains controversial. This paper adopts ex ante predictive power as criterion for the evaluation of the usefulness of theories and policies. For this purpose it attempts to identify the historical rationale of the credit direction policies adopted by Japan—the East Asian country that developed earliest and most successfully. It is found that Japan's directed credit policymakers modeled their system on the practice of the Reichsbank, under its president Hjalmar Schacht in the 1920s, and the economic thought of German development economists at the time, who argued for a strong role of banks as conduits of official guidance within an overall growth-oriented institutional design. This paper provides some support for directed credit policies and offers an alternative explanation for the emergence of a bank-based financial system in Japan and other countries.

Suggested Citation

  • Richard Werner, 2002. "A Reconsideration of the Rationale for Bank-Centered Economic Systems and the Effectiveness of Directed Credit Policies in the Light of Japanese Evidence," Japanese Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 30(3), pages 3-45.
    • Handle: RePEc:mes:jpneco:v:30:y:2002:i:3:p:3-45
    DOI: 10.2753/JES1097-203X30033
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.2753/JES1097-203X30033
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.2753/JES1097-203X30033?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. W. R. Garside, 2012. "Japan’s Great Stagnation," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 14624.
    2. Dittmer, Kristofer, 2015. "100 percent reserve banking: A critical review of green perspectives," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 109(C), pages 9-16.
    3. Richard Werner, 2004. "Why has Fiscal Policy Disappointed in Japan?," Money Macro and Finance (MMF) Research Group Conference 2004 9, Money Macro and Finance Research Group.
    4. Naoise McDonagh, 2021. "Credit Guidance for a Desired Economy: An Original Institutional Economics Critique of Financialization," Review of Radical Political Economics, Union for Radical Political Economics, vol. 53(4), pages 675-693, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:mes:jpneco:v:30:y:2002:i:3:p:3-45. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/MJES19 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.