The machine tool industry in Japan

This paper studies the industrial structure of the machine tool sector in Japan. We tried to face both the evolution of its economic variables, and the most important factors of its strength and weakness. After having considered the start-up and the development of this industry (chapter 1), in the second chapter we underline the role played by industrial policy. Thanks to a policy based on the managed competition Japanese firms overcome rapidly the oil shocks in the Seventies, and the technological change in the Eighties. Within the economic variables our analysis is based on production (chapter 3) and exports (chapter 4). After having considered the industry as a whole, we studied the main industrial groups (chapter 5), their strategies in the technological field (chapter 6), their external growth (chapter 7). The evidence of some relationships between firm's strategy and policy instruments (chapter 8) gives us an optimistic view about the success of Japanese firms in the serious crisis of the Nineties.