JAPAN AND WORLD DEPRESSION E. F. Penrose (1895-1984) JAPAN AND WORLD DEPRESSION

Then and Now

Essays in Memory of E. F. Penrose

Edited by Ronald Dore and Radha Sinha

with assistance from Mari Sako

Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-349-07522-5 ISBN 978-1-349-07520-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-07520-1

©Ronald Dore and Radha Sinha 1987 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1987 978-0-333-37497-9 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly & Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

First published in the United States of America in 1987

ISBN 978-0-312-44054-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Main entry under title: Japan and world depression. Includes index. Contents: Introduction I Ronald Dore and Radha Sinha• Memoirs of Japan, 1925-301E. F. Penrose- Depression and protection I Michael French and Thomas Wilson- [etc.] 1. Japan- Economic conditions- 1918-1945- Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Japan- Economic conditions- 1945- -Addresses, essays, lectures. 3. Business cycles- Japan- Addresses, essays, lectures. 4. Japan- Foreign economic relations- Addresses, essays, lectures. 5. Penrose, E. F. (Ernest Francis), 1895-1984. I. Penrose, E. F. (Ernest Francis), 1895-1984. II. Dore, Ronald Philip. III. Sinha, Radha. IV. Sako, Mari. HC462.8.J378 1987 330.952'033 85-26158 ISBN 978-0-312-44054-1 Dedicated to the memory of Ernest Penrose for his devotion to scholarship, to Japan and to world peace Contents

frontispiece: E. F. Penrose List of Tables ix Preface Xl In Memoriam: Ernest Francis Penrose by Edith Penrose xiii E. F. Penrose: the Record XVII Glossary xxii Notes on the Contributors xxiii

1 Introduction Ronald Dore and Radha Sinha

2 Memoirs of Japan, 1925-30 6 E. F. Penrose

3 Depression and Protection: the Early Thirties and the Early Eighties Compared 14 Michael French and Thomas Wilson

4 Japan and Two World Economic Depressions 32 Martin Bronfenbrenner

5 The Japanese Economy in the Interwar Period: a Brief Summary 52 Takafusa Nakamura

6 Depressions in Japan: the 1930s and the 1970s 68 Tuvia Blumenthal

7 How Fragile a Super State? 83 Ronald Dore

VII viii Contents

8 Japanese Public Opinion and Policies on Security and Defence 111 J. A. A. Stockwin

9 Britain's View of the Japanese Economy in the Early Sh6wa Period 135 Ian Nish

10 Soviet-Japanese Relations, Past and Present 149 Alec Nove

11 Japan's Economic Experience in China before the Establishment of the People's Republic of China: a Retrospective Balance-sheet 155 Christopher Howe

12 Variations on a Pan-Asianist Theme: the 'Special Relationship' between Japan and Thailand 178 Jean-Pierre Lehmann

N arne Index 206 List of Tables

3.1 Rate of change of real National Product and industrial production 16 3.2 Rate of change of real GOP and value-added in industry, 1973-81 18 3.3 Percentage unemployed 19 3.4 Unemployment as percentage of total labour force 20 3.5 Annual changes in prices and wages 22 3.6 Annual rate of change in prices, 1973-82 23 3.7 Annual rate of change in hourly earnings in manufacturing, 1973-81 24 3.8 World production and trade: annual rate of change in volume 30 4.1 Agricultural stagnation in prewar Japan: occupational distribution of employment 34 4.2 Agricultural stagnation in prewar Japan: number of farms 34 4.3 Replacement of raw silk by textiles in export trade in prewar Japan 34 4.4 Progress of heavy industrialisation in prewar Japan: percentage of factory employment in manufacturing industries 35 5.1 Wholesale and consumer price indices for the leading countries 53 5.2 Long-term wholesale price trends in Japan and the UK 55 5.3 Japanese economic indicators in the interwar period 60 5.4 Economic indices for the leading countries 63 6.1 Japan: major indicators, 1930s and 1970s 70 6.2 Composition of GOP in constant prices 73 6.3 Year-to-year changes in components of GOP in constant prices 73 6.4 Contribution to GOP growth rate 75 8.1 Public Opinion Polls: 'Should the Constitution be revised?' 114

ix x List of Tables

8.2 Public Opinion Polls on the Self-Defence Forces 116 8.3 Public Opinion Polls on nuclear weapons 120 8.4 Public Opinion Polls based on the three non-nuclear principles 122 8.5 Public Opinion Polls on 'introduction' of nuclear weapons 123 8.6 Public Opinion Poll on fear of nuclear war 124 8.7 Public Opinion Polls on national security policy 124 8.8 Public Opinion Polls on consciousness offoreign threat 126 8.9 Public Opinion Polls on patriotism 127 8.10 Public Opinion Polls on contemporary defence issues 129 10.1 Soviet trade with Japan 151 10.2 Principal Soviet exports and imports 152 11.1 Trends in key economic indicators, 1900-30 159 11.2 Gross Domestic Product in Manchuria, 1929-41 161 11.3 Cultivated area as percentage of potential cultivated area, 1887-1940 167 Preface

Ernest Penrose was the source of this book in two senses. First and foremost, we wanted to do something to honour a man of whom we were fond and for whose distinguished career we had respect. He was, as it were, a prototype of the new twentieth-century version of international man: a linerport professor before airport professors were ever heard of. Secure in, certainly never relinquishing, his Cornish identity, he moved from Japan to the USA to Switzerland to Britain to Iraq to France, absorbing elements of each culture as he went, finding fascination in, feeling rapport with, each one of them. And always, the work which took him from place to place was informed by a belief in the possibility that rational enquiry, the honest clarification of alternatives, the evaluation of those alternatives by explicit criteria, the laying bare of the causes of things, could improve the human lot, and could, notably, improve the chances of peace between nations. Whether he was looking at the implications of the population/food balance in Japan, examining charges of 'social dumping' in textiles, examining plans for a postwar international economic order as adviser to Ambassador John Winant, helping to set up the International Refugee Organisation with Mrs Roosevelt or, in Paris and in London in later years, writing about the power balance in the Middle East, he brought together just that mix of abilities and motives which makes the best kind of 'concerned academic' - fascination with the intellectual problem of sorting out effects and causes combined with a consciousness that cleverness for cleverness' sake was out of place in issues which affected human lives; awareness of relativities, of how the world looks from different points of view, combined with the belief that there is an objective reality and that one always has to try to see it straight and see it whole. It was as a model of decency in the application of intellect to conflicts of power and interest that we wished to salute him, and our wish to salute him was the origin of this book. 'Then and now' chats with him at Fontainebleau were more directly the inspiration of the book's theme. Japan's climb out of the Depression had been the subject of two of his early articles in the

xi xii Preface

Swedish journal Index, and its wider implications for his book on population policies. The connection between Japan's economic problems - the ineluctable problems of a weak country trying to raise itself out of poverty and using international trade as a key instrument, the vulnerability to the world economic climate which this implied, and the inexorable slide towards repression at home and military expansion abroad - was the theme which had preoccupied him in the thirties, to the memory of which he frequently returned. 'Can it happen again?' is often an absurd question to ask of history, but 'Could the factors which made it happen then still be operating now?' never is. We are very grateful to our colleagues who responded to the theme with their contributions for proving the point once again, as well as for numerous fascinating illustrations of 'the ironies of history' . We had hoped to make the volume a birthday present. In Japan and China Festschriften are seen to be appropriate in one's 60th, 70th and 88th year. The last was particularly appropriate for the original compiler of the 'Nagoya indexes' with its foundation in the rice crop series, since it is known as the rice celebration - 88 being a pun on the ideograph for rice. Alas, we missed it, and a birthday gift has perforce been transformed into a memorial, a commemoration of a distinguished and worthwhile life. May we finally record our thanks to all those who have contributed to the making, the editing and the typing of the book: Anne Carey, Edith and Perran Penrose, Kate Livingstone, Mari Sako and Maria Spoors.

Technical Change Centre, London R.D. University of Glasgow R.S. In Memoriam Ernest Francis Penrose by Edith Penrose

Professor Penrose - Pen -lived and worked in Nagoya between 1925 and 1930. During this period he made major contributions which are still remembered with respect in Japan today. This volume was originally conceived to honour his 88th birthday with a collection of essays on the political economy of the country in which he began his life's work: sadly he did not live to enter his ninth decade and this collection has become a memorial collection. Pen's life, though, covered an extraordinarily wide range of activities. His Japanese experience was important both to Japan and also to himself and to all those who benefited from his practical scholarship in the six decades after he left Japan. This memorial essay sets out to show the great influence his sojourn in Japan had on his intellectual and moral development: Japan had cause to be grateful to him and he had, perhaps, greater cause to be grateful to Japan. Pen was brought up at the turn of the century in the depressed West Country and survived tuberculosis to fight as a gunner in the First World War. He was wounded and contracted trench nephritis but survived the war as well, ready to grasp what opportunities were available to him to change the murderously lunatic course the world seemed to have taken. He went up to Cambridge in 1922 lacking the silver spoon that fed the mouths of most of his contemporaries and survived once more to take a BA in economics in 1925. He often reminisced about the generosity of the economist W. S. Thatcher who was his tutor: his vacation earnings were insufficient to support him entirely and it was Thatcher's generous loan that enabled him to complete his studies. He then went on to Japan. Shortly before he died he dictated a brief account for this volume of his time there. His experience in Japan was profound and, following as it did his years in the trenches, forged his

xiii xiv In Memoriam ideas in the fire of internationalism and conferred on him, he felt, citizenship of the world. 1 Although his major work was statistical, his best-known book on Japan, Population Theories and their Application with Special Reference to Japan, 2 was written after he left the country. In this book the driving preoccupation of his professional life was clearly evident. He ended the book with these words: It is not, therefore, in the circumstances of the external world but in the minds of men that the mainsprings of violent social conflict lie. Prejudices, narrow provincialism, the pursuit of false ends, mistaken notions of the road to material advantage, the lag of immaterial culture behind material culture, and the defects in world political organization which are the results of this lag - these and related factors, and not any shortage of natural resources in the world, are the stuff out of which wars and other violent social conflicts are made. The Malthusian vision of an ever present tendency for reproduction to outstrip production no longer need haunt us. There is no inexorable law, inherent in the processes through which the reproduction of the race is attained, leading mankind to disaster. It is not the niggardliness of Nature but the irrationality of Man that stands in the way of a working solution to the population problems that arise out of the inevitable disparity between the distribution of population and the distribution of natural resources. Pen's life was, in a sense, an odyssey in search of working solutions. After leaving Japan he went to Stanford University where he continued his work on Japan. He also researched into the conditions and costs of the Californian public health services. He took American citizenship and became Associate Professor at the University of California at Berkeley (1935) and in 1938 joined the International Labour Office where he became Chief of the Economic Section. He stayed with the ILO until 1941 and in later years told stories of how he assisted staff members, Jewish and other friends to evade the Nazis and leave the country. In 1941 he was invited by John Winant, by then US Ambassador to London, to become his economic adviser. He worked actively in such disparate fields as the relief of displaced persons and refugees, the Lend Lease Agreement and in the planning of the new international financial and economic organisations during which he, on the American side (though British by birth), would meet Lord Keynes in Soho cafes to seek working solutions over tea and biscuits. After the war he remained deeply engaged with all these issues. In his contribution on displaced persons in Negotiating with the In Memoriam xv

Russians he showed an understanding of the issues which was far ahead of his time. After a period at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton he took the Chair of Geography and International Relations at the Johns Hopkins University where he published Economic Planning for the Peace. He was Visiting Professor at the Australian National University and at Baghdad University. In 1960 he returned to London, resuming British citizenship, disillusioned by the wide• spread acceptance of McCarthy's fanaticism, denouncing publicly and courageously the attacks on academics and others by the witch-hunters of the time. His archives include a box of vicious and vituperative letters from McCarthy's supporters castigating him as a communist and threatening him with physical violence. He spent his time in London on research, writing The Revolution in International Relations. This book affirmed yet again his strong belief in the role of a moral sense and responsibility in international economic and political affairs. He wrote: Human ills of the present time, it is held, are due first of all to villainy and wickedness, especially that which is associated with the wrong doctrines ... if these conceptions of morality are among the most dangerous in international affairs; if there is no greater danger to peace than the self-righteous attitude of the doctrinaire, wedded with fanatical zeal to his doctrine, believing in it wholly and convinced that a frontal show-down must come in which his doctrine will triumph over competing doctrines or he will perish in the attempt, it still remains true that morality is as important as knowledge and understanding in international affairs. He then moved to France where he lived until his death in March 1984. In many ways he found an intellectual haven in France and was sympathetic with the greater breadth of scholarship to be found among French historians and political scientists: at the age of 80 he saw himself in spirit as a radical Frenchman. His death in 1984 in France seems a long way from Japan in 1926 and another world. He had travelled far, not only in time and space but also through many intellectual horizons. His work on Japan and on population influenced generations of students of these subjects; his work on medical services in California (an application of his continued interest in population, for he always became involved wherever he lived) had an impact on those working with the Californian State legislature and caused him to be denounced by officials of the American Medical Association. His work on war economics had more xvi In Memoriam than an immediately practical use; his publications on reconstruction, both on economic planning for the peace and on displaced persons, were important contributions to history and were widely cited, attracting numerous postgraduate students to his study both in England and France eager to interview the man whose books and articles they had read, whose diplomatic despatches they had used when wartime archives became released for public research: these are now widely referred to in footnotes of books on postwar economic and political history. Inevitably, much of his written work served primarily as raw material for official committees in a variety of different contexts and countries. Who, for example, would now know of his important, though in the end abortive, contributions to the development of the University of Baghdad before the Iraqi revolution, work since swept away by revolutionary events? This work yet remains a document of historical importance, perhaps to be studied in the future. He sought no fame, but in disparate fields his work is still used and remembered. He was always moving from field to field, from country to country, striking his roots everywhere and nowhere. As his end drew near he 'raged against the dying of the light', unable to read and write because of failing eyesight, holding ahead of him the vision of his final work, a synthesis of all his experiences and studies. This he never wrote, to our loss, but for what we have we are grateful. Pen was very pleased when Ron Dore and Radha Sinha broached their plans for this volume. He did not live tosee its completion but I and his children - Margaret, Joan, Douglas, Perran, Trevear and his step-son David - want to thank the editors of and the contributors to this book on his behalf and our own.

NOTES

1. It should be noted here that Martin Bronfenbrenner recognises Pen's internationalism but incorrectly derives from this the conjecture that he would have 'recognized Manchukuo as a fait accompli'. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was in London when he first saw the book edited by Mrs Schumpeter containing his long article on Japanese industrialisation and was furious at the title, about which he had not been consulted. He never accepted the name 'Manchukuo' for Manchuria and subsequently refused to list the book under that name among his publications. He would also, incidentally, have frowned at being labelled 'neoclassical'! 2. Again Bronfenbrenner misinterprets Pen's view of what was needed in Japanese agriculture. He did not advocate a 'scaling-down' of agriculture but rather increased productivity with a smaller population on the land - a very different point (see Chapter 5 of his population book). E. F. Penrose: the Record

E. F. Penrose was born in Plymouth, England, on 21 January 1895, and he died on 7 March 1984 at Fontainebleau, France. He served in the First World War, 1914-18. He studied at the University of Exeter (1919-21), the University of Cambridge (BA Economics Tripos, 1925; MA, 1930), and Stanford University, California (PhD Economics, 1933).

RESUME OF ACTIVITIES

1925-30: Professor, Research Bureau of Nagoya College of Commerce, Nagoya, Japan

In this period he carried out the first systematic research into the course of population and production in Japan from the later Meiji period to the early Showa period, and constructed the first indexes of the physical volume of production ever constructed in Japan for agriculture, fisheries and mining. Geometrically weighted averages for each group and for all three combined were constructed for the years 1894-1927. They were first published in a study in English in which they were compared with an index of population increase, showing conclusively that, contrary to widespread opinion at that time, production per head of population substantially increased in a period of rapid population growth. Shortly before leaving Japan he began working on quantum indexes of exports and imports but, not having the time to carry them through, he left the materials for one of his former students to complete. The indexes of physical volume were continued for subsequent years by a former assistant and were used by Professor Lockwood in Economic Development in Japan 1868-1939, published in 1954, and by Professor G. C. Allen in his writings. The original indexes were discussed and quoted extensively by Colin Clark in each edition of The Conditions of Economic Progress.

xvii xviii The Record

This work appeared in Food Supply and Raw Materials in Japan (1930) with the sponsorship of the Institute of Pacific Relations whose research secretary, Dr J. B. Condliffe, and his deputy, Mr W. L. Holland, encouraged and assisted the work of publication.

1930-5: Research Associate, Food Research Institute, Stanford University, California

At this Institute he was particularly associated with the food and pop• ulation problems of the Far East, including South-eastern Asia, with special attention given to the transition from subsistence to cash-crop farming and the dependence on world trade which resulted. His most substantial publication during this period was Population Theories and their Application, with Special Reference to Japan, which was widely quoted and used (see references in the index of the UN publication Demographic Trends). Other publications were two long articles in Index (Stockholm) on 'Japan and the World Economic Depression' (1935), which analysed the remarkable recovery and readjustment of Japan's external trade at a time of continued depression in world trade. During this period he also took six months' leave to act as Research Director of the California Medical-Economic Survey, and was co-author with P. A. Dodd of Economic Aspects of Medical Services. This was an investigation, aided by a staff of fieldworkers, into the condition and costs of public health services.

1935-9: Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley

At this time he was also associated with the Harvard Bureau of International Relations in a study of the economic development of Japan in the 1930s. The results of this project appeared in a large study published in 1940 (his manuscript was completed in 1938) under the editorship of Mrs E. B. Schumpeter, Industrialization of Japan and Manchukuo. His contribution consisted of an application of the latest demographic methods of analysis to the Japanese Population Statistics since 1920; a detailed quantitative and qualitative examination of agricultural growth, of food production and consumption, and of external trade, both with foreign countries and with the rest of the Japanese Empire. Next came an examination of fisheries, and last of all the raw material basis of industry, setting out in detail the mineral position, both as to domestic production and as to trade, and the earlier stages of manufacture in the iron and steel industry. The Record XIX

1938-41: Economic Adviser to the International Labour Office and from 1939 Chief of the Economic Section of the ILO

He prepared a plan to follow up the World Textile Conference and completed a detailed memorandum proposing that the ILO should set up a permanent tripartite textile committee. This memorandum was adopted by the Office and Governing Body and was on the agenda for adoption at a conference in Oslo that was called off owing to the outbreak of war. The matter was postponed until after the war when the textile committee and the tripartite industry committees were established. As the approaching war gradually depleted the ILO economic staff it was decided to turn the research programme towards war economic problems. Much time was taken up with emergencies, especially after the fall of France when members of the international staff in special danger from the Nazis had to be moved from the continent and decisions had to be taken on the immediate future of the League of Nations and the ILO. But work continued and the results appeared in one study of which he was editor and part author, Studies in War Economics, which was published shortly after the Office was moved from Geneva to Montreal in the autumn of 1940.

1941-6: Wartime diplomatic activities

In August 1941 he was invited by the State Department in Washington to take a post as Economic Adviser to Ambassador Winant in London and remained there until the middle of 1946. He worked on, and took part in, negotiations on relief and early reconstruction questions respecting food, transport, agricultural and industrial rehabilitation, and displaced persons and refugees. One of his chief activities was the drafting, negotiation and planning for implementation of Article VII of the Lend Lease Agreement. On these matters he was in continuous touch with the British Treasury and Foreign Office, especially with the late Lord Keynes, and attended the informal talks among British and American economists in which draft charters of the new international economic organisations to be set up were studied and amended. The whole of this work is analysed and discussed in detail in Economic Planning for the Peace (Princeton, 1953). He contributed to the Proposals for an International Trade Organization published in 1945 and spent much time in London and on visits to Washington in the attempt to secure agreement on numerous points of difference. xx The Record

1946-7: Adviser, United Nations Economic and Social Council

He was adviser to the US delegation to the UN Economic and Social Council at Lake Success and took part also in the meetings of the Economic Committee of the Assembly. The problems of reconstruction in Europe came to occupy much of his time but in addition he acted as an adviser to Mrs Franklin Roosevelt on the Social Committee of the UN General Assembly when the constitution of the International Refugee Organisation was worked out. He gave a full account of this in his section of Negotiating with the Russians (Boston: World Peace Foundation, 1951, pp. 139-68).

1947-8: Member of the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey

At Princeton he worked out the general plan and assembled the materials for a comprehensive study of the international economic and financial planning during the war for the postwar period and in addition began a re-evaluation of the ideas and measures adopted in the light of postwar experience.

1948-60: Professor of Geography and International Relations, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

His chief publication in this period was Economic Planning for the Peace (1953). It is a study of both political and economic influences since the actual preparation for dealing with economic conditions after the war cannot be made intelligible in isolation from the political situation of the time. This is particularly marked in the five chapters of the study dealing with Germany where political influences were dominant during the whole period and economic planning became almost wholly subordinate to them. During this period he spent one year as Visiting Professor at the Australian National University (1955) and two years at the University of Baghdad as Professor of Economics and Head of the Department of Economics (1957-9).

1960-78

He took early retirement and went to London where he did research at the Institute of Historical Research, the Institute of Commonwealth The Record xxi

Studies, Chatham House and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London University. He also spent much time in Paris at the Fondation National des Sciences Politiques working on the Middle East and international relations. He edited and contributed to a number of books, his chief work in this period being Iraq: International Relations and National Development (with Edith Penrose).

1978-84

He continued research and wntmg at Fontainebleau where Mrs Penrose was Professor of Political Economy at INSEAD. He published newspaper articles and did research on the Cold War. Glossary

ASEAN Association of South-East Asian Nations ESCAP Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade IBS International Bank of Settlements IMF International Monetary Fund LOP Liberal Democratic Party MITI Ministry of International Trade and Industry NICs Newly Industrialised Countries OECD Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development OPEC Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries SDF Self-Defence Forces SMR South Manchuria Railway

xxii Notes on the Contributors

Tuvia Blumenthal is Professor at Ben-Gurion University, Israel. He has written widely on the Japanese economy, including Saving in Postwar Japan and Nihon Keizai no Seicho Yoin (Factors in Japan's Economic Growth).

Martin Bronfenbrenner is Professor of International Economics at Aoyama Gakuin University, Japan. He is the author of Income Distribution Theory and Macroeconomic Alternatives and numerous other writings on economic issues.

Ronald Dore is Assistant Director of the Technical Change Centre, London, and Visiting Professor at Imperial College, University of London. He is the author of British Factory - Japanese Factory, Flexible Rigidities and various other writings on the Japanese society and economy.

Michael French is Lecturer in Economic History at the University of Glasgow. His main research interests are in US economic and business history.

Christopher Howe is Professor of Economics with reference to Asia, University of London. His publications include Wage Patterns and Wage Policy in Modern China 1919-1972 and China's Economy: A Basic Guide.

Jean-Pierre Lehmann is Associate Professor of International Business at the Euro-Asia Centre, INSEAD, France. His publications include The Image of Japan, 1850-1905, From Feudal Isolation to World Power and The Roots of Modern Japan.

Takafusa Nakamura is Professor of Economics at the University of Tokyo, Japan. Previously he was the Director-General of the Economic Research Institute of the Economic Planning Agency of the

XXIII xxiv Notes on the Contributors

Japanese government. His writings include Economic Growth in Prewar Japan (translated from the Japanese) and The Postwar Japanese Economy.

Ian Nish is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics. He is the author of The Anglo-Japanese Alliance, Alliance in Decline, Japanese Foreign Policy 1869-1942 and Origins of the Russo-Japanese War.

Alec Nove is a former James Boner Professor of Economics at the University of Glasgow. His publications include Economic History of the USSR, Stalinism and After, Soviet Economic System and The Economics of Feasible Socialism.

Radha Sinha is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Japan 's Options for the 1980s and various other writings on Asian economic development.

J. A. A. Stockwin is Nissan Professor of Modern Japanese Studies and Director of the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Japan: Divided Politics in a Growth Economy and is currently working on a study of the Japanese political system and political decision-making.

Thomas Wilson is a former Adam Smith Professor of Political Economy at the University of Glasgow (1958-82). He was a Fellow of University College and Lecturer at the University of Oxford from 1946 to 1958. He is the author of various books and articles, his most recent book being Inflation, Unemployment and the Market.