Productivity is essentially a measure of the productive ability of an organization. The standpoint of measurement of producton efficiency according to the ratio of output and input of production has been currently used for productivity. However, production is requested to basically achieve the production objectives basically. After the production objectives are achieved, it is necessary to evaluate the production efficiency. Therefore, it is proposed that an ovganization measure productivity from two standpoints, such as objective achievement and production efficiency, Which is desoribed in this research.

Moreover, from the standpoint of production efficiency, productivity has been divided in to labor productivity, equipment productivity and materials productivity, referred to as individual productivities or partial productivities. However, these three aspects are not really reality separate, they are interrelated. The total productivity is an organizations productivity expressed in the from of a single indicator obtained by converting the individual input to a common unit and then combining them. From the standpoint of objective achievement, the production objectives are able to be divided into quality, cost and delivery in general. It is necessary to think about the total productivity as an integratedability to achieve a mutual relation between these characteristics.

As mentioned above, the production abilities are divided in to two aspects, objective achievement and production efficiency. Based on these aspects, some ideas of productivity and its measurement are proposed in this paper.

From the owners' point of view, the corporate investment decision should be made so as to maximize shareholders wealth in accordance with a rational rule such as present value or internal rate of the return method. But managers are often inclined to neglect this rule and to act against the interests of shareholders and superiors, because they have incentives to maximize their own interests. Hence it is necessary to construct performance evaluation system which makes it possible to appropriately control the managerial investment incentives and to induce managers to follow the rational decision rule.

In this paper, I discuss how to motivate managers to make optimal investment decisions. For that purpose, I described their investment behaviors by a numerical example of the agency model based on learning about managerial ability, developed by Holmstrom and Ricat i Costa. I investigated a managers' concerns about the impact of their decisions on their future careers or concerns for reputation in a managerial labor market may influence and distort their investment decisions. And I argue that the optimal compensation contract to motivate efficient investment behavior should be long-term with a downward rigid structure like stock options and should be aligned to the economic performance (increase of firm value) for which managers are responsible to generate from the investment. Finally, based on the results of recent empirical research in the U.S., it is shown that a positive relationship between the chief executives pay and corporate performance as measured by shareholder return has become significantly strong over the past 15 years.

Recently, one of the considerations for winning market competition is the enlargement of intellectual assets and their effective control. Intellectual assets are the set of intangible assets such as skills, relationships, knowledges and information, which are created by the company itself. Most of the assets are intangible ones which are not shown in the financial statement. Intellectual assets are generally composed of customer assets, structual assets and human assets. These are more useful than tangible assets to increase profit. Because intellectual assets are various, the total valuation by many various measures is better than by one financial measure.

Another consideration is to fuse top-down type management with empowerment type management properly. The former is well fitted in coping with the structual changes of a company such as the extension and the reduction of markets and technological innovations; the latter is well fitted in increasing the adaptability and the flexibility in responding to customers' needs sensitively. Recently, the nonfinancial measures are useful in empowerment type management have been especially emphasized; however, I think total management by using nonfinancial measures and financial measures is important in both cases.

We have had the management method by a balanced scorecard to excute total management effectively in consideration of these points; however, I will consider TP (total productivity) management, which is similar to that method, and is probably more advanced. than that. TP management was created in Japan. TP management is useful as a way of focusing all employees in a common direction by using matrix thinking and a matrix system when considering various goals and policies. I will point out that the method is also useful in empowerment type management connected with company-wide goals by deploying their goals into individual employee' goals. Moreover, I will point out that the problems of budgetary control can be resolved by the connection of budgetary control to TP management.

This paper focuses on management control systems in Japanese companies. In Japan, many companies have introduced a paying for performance system and new performance measurements. In this paper, we thought of the effects of these new systems.

First, researched reward systems in the States through literature. Next, we analyzed the changes in reward systems and performance measurements in order to reform managers and employees' consciousness in Japanese companies. This reformation enabled changes in performance measurement and in reward systems tool place simultaneously.

In Japanese companies, management control systems are going to be one cycle systems. The effect well caus a mind change mind in many companies.

The term group management hascurrently become increasingly popular in Japan. Why? One of the reasons is thought to be influenced by the change in the financial reporting system. If you think that the financial reporting system greatly influences the management of a company, it follows that group management is advanced over Europe and America where the consolidated accounting information has been uses for a longer time.

This paper is based on the literature survey and the author's field studies concerning group management in European and American enterprises. These enterprises are globally developing much activity today. Therefore, when management accounting for group management is to be examined, it is necessary to target a global group.

First I took a general view of the current state of the enterprise group in Europe and America that globally develops the activity. Next, I examined the role that the person in charge of management accounting is playing in such an enterprise as group management. It is a purpose of this paper to investigate what kind of amanagement accounting systems should be designed for a management accountant to play that role.

Most of the Korean firms are interested in cost reduction by making improvements and innovations to logistics activities, because logistics costs have been recognized as one key factor in high business costs. Therefore it is necessary to introduce new cost management techniques for cost reductions, because of the limits of cost reductions by traditional cost control techniques.

This study is intented to analyse the Logistics Costs Management Systems (LCMS) in selected Korean firms. It reviews the results of logistics costs and logistics management and surveys Korean firms theoretically, and surveys the LCMS in reiation to the Korean firms.

The results of this study are as follows:

1) Most Korean firms recognize the necessity of the LCMS, and manage based on the cost accounting systems and the budgeting systems for logistics. But, only a few firms use profitability analysis methods. As a comparision of past surveys results, the use of costs information is expanded in the fields of budgetary control and profitabilty analysis.

2) A few firms use new cost management and revolutionary management techniques which include ABC/ABM, Quality Costing, BPR, Restructuring and Benchmarking. Therefore, the survey and reviews are necessary to adapt new cost management techniques onto the LCMS.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the state of the computer-based accounting practices of small- and medium-sized businesses throughout Japan in relation to the characteristics of accounting information systems. There are about 2,300,000 businesses in Japan, over 99% of which are small or middle-sized. Because there are too many businesses in this category to sample, it is difficult to conduct an accurate study of the actual situation of their accounting practices. Therefore, other methods must be found in order to achieve this end. Most small- and medium-sized businesses do not handle their own accounts but hire accounting firms instead. This suggests that it could be possible to conduct this study from the point of view of accounting firms. Since accounting firms use computer-based accounting systems, the accounting practices of small- and medium-sized businesses are influenced by the accounting information systems available at such firms. Computer-service companies manufacture software to be used by accounting firms in computer-based accounting systems. Thus, it could also be possible to study those accounting practices by examining the computer-service companies. We call the interrelation among small- and medium-sized businesses, accounting firms, and computer-service companies a "triple-strata accounting structure." We conclude that we can study the actual situation of the accounting practices of small- and medium-sized businesses in Japan by means of the "triple-strata accounting structure."

This paper investigates how the supplier and paternal manufacturer relations will affect target costing performance, by use of a questionnaire survey for the Japanese companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The log-linear model was applied to the data of category variables as factors in the hypothesis. This method will estimate the effects of each variable as well as the combination of categories of various variables.

In this research, we found the following results.

Regardless of the “detail-controlled parts” maker or the “black-box parts” maker, the higher the benefit and risk accompanied are shared by these two parties, the higher the company possesses the information of the parts maker. Further, the higher the company shares benefit and risk in producing the parts with the “detail-controlled parts” maker, the better the target cost of a product is achieved. However, even middle level sharing of the benefit and risk will have positive effect on the target cost reduction performance.

On the other hand, it was found that if the company would hold much information about the “detail-controlled parts” maker, the higher achievement of the target cost of the product is. Conversely, such evidence was not found for the “blackbox parts” maker. Moreover, it was also found that if the company did not hold so much information about the “detail-controlled parts” maker, the target cost of the product would not be achieved well. However, such evidence was not found for the “black-box parts” maker.

Usually a principal motivates an agent through performance information. This should be possible when the information is verifiable. Verifiable information means that the information can be observed by third parties so that the information can be used as a variable of a contract. But in practice, we can easily find cases in which performance information is not necessarily verifiable. In this article, I look for a way to motivate an agent by monitoring his effort, on the assumption that the performance information is not verifiable.

First of all, I show that if performance information is not verifiable, the principal can not have the first best solution without infinitely preparing a large penalty for the agent so that he does not shirk from his work. When the agent can not bear the penalty because of a restriction against his assets, the principal may need to guarantee that the agent would assume a limited liability. Secondly, I show that even though the principal must assume the agent's limited liability, there can be a profitable contract for both of them. Lastly, I show that though advanced information technology which enables the performance information to be verifiable, the monitoring system can be a better solution than the information system to motivate the agent.

The analysis proceeds as follows.In Section 1, the model is described. In Section 2, I analyze the model to examine the characteristics of the optimal solution. In the last Section, I give some concluding remarks.

Recently, profit maximization for shareholders is drawing attention as a standard to measure the performance of a firm. In this survey, I picked three valuation models (discounted cash flow model, EVA model, and Ohlson model) and examined which performance measure based on the valuation models (cash flow, EVA, and residual income) can contribute to profit maximization of the shareholders. I critically compared the usefulness of cash flow information to accounting earnings and showed that the former comes with limited usefulness. As a consequence, I demonstrated that an earnings-based performance measure is more suitable for share-holder-oriented management.

There are two major implications of this survey. The first is that a discounted cash flow model is less practical than accounting-based valuation models, and cash flow is less useful than earnings-based numbers for performance measurement. The second is that although residual income is the performance measure that is the most directly associated with maximizing a shareholders' wealth, EVA can be also useful depending on the cost and benefits of implementing it.

Maximizing cash flow is becoming a key corporate objective in Japan. However the concept is often misunderstood that it is just a working capital management, a cash pooling or a divestment of money losing business unit. We define the cash flow management as the same as Value Based Management, which means that applying a shareholder value concept to strategic and operational decision making, is a powerful way of energizing the whole corporation in pursuit of value.

In creating a long-term strategy, we sometimes use Scenario Envisioning, an innovative technique used to develop a new vision of an industry's possible future with our clients. Then, we evaluate a client's current business model against some future scenarios and design a new business model to survive in a new environment. Shareholder value analysis is a precise tool to evaluate the long-term economic impact of environmental changes and strategic options.

To make Value Based Management a reality, we need performance measures, which can measure real shareholder value creation in a certain period, and we need to incentivize people at all levels to pursue the overriding objective of improving shareholder value. The Economic Profit is suitable for these objects.