The Financial Behavior Of Japanese Corporations
Naturally much of this book concerns technical detail but it is a valuable guide to the differences between Western and Japanese businesses and the way the latter handle debt, equity and profits. Professor Ballon of Sophia University and Mr. Tomita of Touche Ross International, who write clearly as well as authoritatively, see important changes since the mid-1970s in how Japanese industry is financed.
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East Asia was a stable region in 1984, marked by general progress toward the goals laid down by the various national leaderships. In Japan, Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone's election to a second two-year term signified continuity in foreign policy and particularly in the partnership between Washington and Tokyo. Not only is the close security relationship with the United States being maintained; Japan also began significant movement toward a modest but increasing political role in global affairs.
The major events of 1983 in East Asian politics and economics can be looked at from three broad vantage points or planes of abstraction. At the most general level one sees, rather like the movements of tectonic plates on the earth's surface, a slight shift in the center of gravity of U.S. foreign policy from Europe toward Asia. In large part this shift is prompted by a growing realization among the leaders of the United States and Japan that their nations will, for the indefinite future, be paramount in the fundamental sciences and their practical offshoots in microelectronics, biotechnology, fine ceramics, and other new areas of technical development, and that Western Europe will trail in most of these fields and the Soviet Union simply be left behind. The fact that the American President met with the prime minister of Japan three times during 1983 underscores this trend, as did the President's statement in Tokyo in November that "No relationship between any two countries is more important to world peace and prosperity than the relationship between the United States and Japan."
Future historians may well mark the mid-1980s as the time when Japan surpassed the United States to become the world's dominant economic power. Japan achieved superior industrial competitiveness several years earlier, but by the mid-1980s its high-technology exports to the United States far exceeded imports, and annual trade surpluses approached $50 billion a year. Meanwhile, America's trade deficits mushroomed to $150 billion a year. By late 1985, Japan's international lending already exceeded $640 billion, about ten percent more than America's, and it is growing rapidly. By 1986 the United States became the world's largest debtor nation and Japan surpassed the United States and Saudi Arabia to become the world's largest creditor.

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