DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Japan's Economic Planning and Mobilization in Wartime, 1930s–1940s

The Competence of the State

Yoshiro Miwa author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:22nd Jan '15

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Japan's Economic Planning and Mobilization in Wartime, 1930s–1940s cover

Miwa analyzes how the Japanese government prepared itself for the Second World War and the war with China preceding it.

Yoshiro Miwa analyzes the extent to which the Japanese government prepared itself for the Second World War and the war with China that preceded it. He finds the government – despite its reputation for industrial planning – was ill-prepared and draws sophisticated lessons about the ability of governments to plan their economies.Although most economists maintain a mistrust of a government's goals when it intervenes in an economy, many continue to trust its actual ability. They retain, in other words, a faith in state competence. For this faith, they adduce no evidence. Sharing little skepticism about the government's ability, they continue to expect the best of governmental intervention. To study government competence in World War II Japan offers an intriguing laboratory. In this book, Yoshiro Miwa shows that the Japanese government did not conduct requisite planning for the war by any means. It made its choices on an ad hoc basis and the war itself quickly became a dead end. That the government planned for the war incompetently casts doubts on the accounts of Japanese government leadership more generally.

'A leading skeptic of the Chalmers Johnson view of Japanese bureaucratic competence confronts the reality of a country mired - after remarkable successes - in an ill-planned, muddled, and unwinnable war. For Professor Miwa's admirers (of which I count myself one), this powerful broadside confirms his sure combination of historical research with critical economic analysis. For doubters, this exposé of wartime armaments production offers renewed challenges.' Leslie Hannah, London School of Economics and Political Science
'A brilliant and prolific economist, Professor Yoshiro Miwa explores the Japanese government's efforts to plan the economy in the 1930s and 1940s. If ever any government operated within an institutional structure that would have fostered economic planning, the Japanese government had that structure here: popular support, a compliant legislature, control over the necessary incentives. Notwithstanding that structure, the government's efforts to plan the economy failed disastrously. With incisive analytic tools, Professor Miwa explores the reasons for the failure.' J. Mark Ramseyer, Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies, Harvard University, Massachusetts
'… [a] highly detailed evaluation of wartime economic policy and action … Recommended.' W. D. Kinzley, Choice

ISBN: 9781107026506

Dimensions: 236mm x 159mm x 33mm

Weight: 890g

482 pages