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This analysis of the Japanese textile sector illustrates how intra-industry cleavages are becoming an integral feature of Japanese trade policymaking. In the past, a pattern of cross-sectoral variation in trade policy could be observed, as the government protected declining industries at home and sought to open foreign markets for the competitive export sector. The internationalization of Japanese firms, however, has radically affected the articulation of corporate trade policy preferences. There is an ongoing breakdown in solidarity among industry members based on their degree of multinationality and/or their reverse importing strategies. These clashes put contradictory pressures on the Japanese government, making it more difficult to predict the course of trade liberalization in Japan.

This is the first paper in a volume devoted exclusively to antitrust law and economics. It summarizes the other papers and addresses two issues. First, after showing that the federal courts generally view consumer welfare as the ultimate goal of antitrust law, it asks what they mean by that term. It concludes that recent decisions appear more likely to equate consumer welfare with the well-being of consumers in the relevant market than with economic efficiency. Second, it asks whether a buyer must possess monopsony power to induce a price discrimination that is not cost justified. It concludes that a buyer can often obtain an unjustified concession simply by wielding bargaining power, but the resulting concession may frequently – though not always – improve consumer welfare.

No firm is an island. Decisions, actions, and outcomes of a firm are embedded in their relationships with suppliers, customers, competitors, downstream, and upstream firms. The formation and management of strategic alliances among firms within an interfirm network of firms inform awareness that a firm needs to develop a strategic stance explicitly of its contributions and the resulting outcomes of all participants within an interfirm network of firms.

Rather than organize as traditional firms, many of today’s companies organize as platforms that sit at the nexus of multiple exchange and production relationships. This chapter considers a most basic question of organization in platform contexts: the choice of boundaries. Herein, I investigate how classical economic theories of firm boundaries apply to platform-based organization and empirically study how executives made boundary choices in response to changing market and technical challenges in the early mobile computing industry (the predecessor to today’s smartphones). Rather than a strict or unavoidable tradeoff between “openness-versus-control,” most successful platform owners chose their boundaries in a way to simultaneously open-up to outside developers while maintaining coordination across the entire system.

Andrew Williams and I have argued since the early 1990s that not only have equity (and subsequently most other assets classes) come to be dominated by institutional ownership of various types, an observation that many have made and documented at length, but that the majority of those institutions are fiduciary ones (primarily pension and mutual funds in the United States). More recently pension and mutual funds have been the source of the majority of funds for many ‘alternative’ investments, such as hedge funds, private equity and commodity funds. In the last two decades there have been parallel developments in other countries, although the form of the institutional investors vary widely, from fiduciary ones mostly in common law countries to fiduciary-like ones in many civil law jurisdictions (e.g. the Netherlands), to some sovereign wealth funds (e.g. Norway and Australia and some others) which do not have fiduciary obligations as such, but in their legal mandates and practices are structured much like those that are fiduciary or fiduciary like. As discussed below, all these (in addition to some other large institutional owners) are universal owners, that is, they own a representative cross section of their investment universe (which increasingly is a global universe). Given their ownership structure characterised by a large degree of diversification, universal owners' long-term interests to a large degree coincide with the economy as a whole.

Understanding economic development in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) requires an analysis of investment in these economies. Previous analyses, however, have focused primarily if not singularly on the role of foreign direct investment (FDI; Akbar & McBride, 2004; Clague & Rausser, 1992; Uhlenbruck & De Castro, 2000). This focus follows that of regional policy-makers, who heavily encouraged FDI through acquisition or greenfield investments (Frydman, Rapaczynski, & Earle, 1993). These policy-makers, however, additionally established stock exchanges in each of their countries. There are now at least 24 operating stock exchanges in CEE and the countries that previously made up the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia.¹ The role of the development of these local stock exchanges in the development (LSED) of local economies (primarily through foreign portfolio investment) has not yet been systematically examined, nor has it been linked explicitly to the role of FDI. Finally, the role of local companies’ listings on foreign exchanges (FSEL) has not been examined in tandem with the role of FDI or LSED (for an examination of the relationship between FDI, LSED, and FSEL, however, see Claessens, Klingebiel, & Schmukler, 2001).

We analyze fluctuations in inflation and the nominal exchange rate under optimal monetary policy with local currency pricing by developing two-country DSGE local currency pricing and producer currency pricing models. We estimate our models using Bayesian techniques with Japanese and US data, and calculate impulse response functions. Our estimation results show that local currency pricing is strongly supported against producer currency pricing. From the estimated parameters, we show that completely stabilizing consumer price index inflation is optimal from the viewpoint of minimizing welfare costs and that completely stabilizing consumer price index inflation is consistent with completely stabilizing the nominal exchange rate.

Internet + and Electronic Business in China is a comprehensive resource that provides insight and analysis into E-commerce in China and how it has revolutionized and continues to revolutionize business and society. Split into four distinct sections, the book first lays out the theoretical foundations and fundamental concepts of E-Business before moving on to look at internet+ innovation models and their applications in different industries such as agriculture, finance and commerce. The book then provides a comprehensive analysis of E-business platforms and their applications in China before finishing with four comprehensive case studies of major E-business projects, providing readers with successful examples of implementing E-Business entrepreneurship projects.

Internet + and Electronic Business in China is a comprehensive resource that provides insights and analysis into how E-commerce has revolutionized and continues to revolutionize business and society in China.