Growth or Decline: Improving Economic “Metabolism” to Raise Productivity

Professor Kyoji Fukao, Program Director and Professor, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University, wrote this on-point article in the Nikkei Newspaper's Keizai Kyoushitsu column on July 27 of 2011, describing the challenges that Japan's economy faces and the what is needed to get it growing again.

Much of the article appears below, but you can see the full article and the charts on RIETI's web site:

Radical(?) Suggestion #1 to Improve Global Corporate Governance

For some time it has seemed to me that our thinking about corporate governance has become blindered by the existingframework and playerswe have created, which have becomeself-sustaining and assumed to be immutablenomatter howimperfectthey are.This is the first of a series of ideas and suggestions that I hope will provoke productive discussion unhindered by such assumptions.

” The Corporation ” (Movie)

Too big to fail. Massive externalization of risks. Environmental damage. Institutionalized moral hazard…..

Corporations havebecome so powerful over the years. Surely, they are one of the dominant institutions in today's world.

In an era when we see so much damages caused by corporations, maybe it is good idea to look at the origin, history and evolution of corporations and to rethink about what corporations really exist for.

What Do Company Secretaries Do in the U.K.?

In the U.K., it is sometimes said that the company secretary is the conscience of the company. From this it is clear that this is a very established role in the U.K., with greater impact than the U.S. and Japan. Some say that this role should be clearly adopted by statutory auditors in Japan.

From thisreport/survey by theComany Secretarial Services Quality House, one can get a better idea of what company secretaries in the U.K. actually do:

http://bdti.mastertree.jp/f/xha7jdqt