In this article, I examine as a case study Zenkaren, the truck-transportation control association. This paper also discusses issues related to resource allocation mechanisms through control or market forces. After World War Two, many Japanese army trucks were used for the private informal transportation business. In March 1946 the Transport Ministry expanded the national truck-transportation (Shoueijidousha), aiming to check the power of this informal freight and gain control over the truck-transportation sector. However, this policy was against the interests of formal truck-transportation private companies. Zenkaren lobbied against this policy, and consequently the policy was reduced in part. At the same time, GHQ was planning to sell off military trucks and trailers in Japan. The Japanese government planned that Shoueijidousha would manage these trucks and trailers. Zenkaren lobbied against this plan however and it was terminated, Shoueijidousha being restrained by agreement between Zenkaren and the Transport Ministry. From the above, we can conclude that Zenkaren's post-war lobbying reflected different conditions from the World War Two period. This condition change was brought about by allocation issues due to increased numbers of trucks. Next I consider the rationing of fuel, tires and new trucks, examined through examples of companies' actions to obtain those materials. Under the rationing system, fuel was linked with important loads. This coordination was achieved through the control association. But this system only covered part of the fuel allocation system. Many companies obtained fuel from the informal market. The informal market absorbed most of the tires available, and pushing the price every higher. The control association and many companies experienced financial difficulties as a result, and also the number of privately-owned trucks increased. Last, many companies diversified in order to carry more loads. Further research on this diversification would clarify the issue whether companies' actions might not necessarily be profitable within the control system.

View full abstract

This paper examines how municipal electricity services could sustain themselves as autonomous systems under the expansion of wide-area power networks during the Weimar period, the era in which the system of wide-area power networks was established. Its aim is to attempt to introduce an alternative viewpoint, the sustainability of the municipal electricity system, into the study of the history of electricity services in Germany Although a lot of cities came under the control of wide-area power networks in the 1920s, these networks did not completely replace municipal electricity services. This was the outcome of a communal effort, especially in big cities, to maintain their own power stations against wide-area power networks. Frankfurt was a case of such a community. Frankfurt tried not only to enlarge its power station but also to utilize waterpower and brown coal near the city, in order to defend the autonomy of its electricity service against the Rheinisch-Westfalisches Elektrizitatswerk AG (RWE), which aimed to monopolize the electricity service in Frankfurt. These projects constructed an electricity system which enabled the preservation of an autonomous electricity service in Frankfurt. This system went on to function until the second half of the 20th century. But Frankfurt could not achieve such a result by itself. It owed a lot to the assistance of Preussenelektra, the national power company of Prussia. The Prussian government needed to strengthen its relationship with Frankfurt, in order to hinder the expansion of RWE, to integrate the electricity services in Rhein-Main area, and to promote the economic development of Saargebiet. These strategies of the Prussian government strongly influenced the development of the electricity system in Frankfurt.

View full abstract

Much literature exists concerning the causes for the Asian financial crisis, organized around the axes of actual and apparent reasons. However most of these causal analyses are flawed by being based on the very assumptions about policy approaches which they are attempting to justify. In this paper, aside from the suitability of policy approaches, we analyze the root causes of the financial crisis by examining what form of linkage existed between the flow of international short term funds and the Thai financial system, and establish how this brought about the process from economic bubble to financial crisis. The main findings of our analysis are as follows. First, the main causes of the real estate bubble were speculative investment by foreign investors via non-resident baht accounts and speculative financing by finance companies which were subsidiaries of local commercial banks. Second, the intensive inflow of foreign short-term capital clearly contributed to heavy industrialization and rapidly transformed domestic financial markets. Therefore, the Bank of Thailand (BOT) could not quickly impose an effective credit squeeze. Consequently, the financial system changed to one where financial institutions had huge amounts of bad debt, and a liquidity crisis arose from the rapid flight of huge foreign short-term capital when the bubble economy burst. The structural change itself was the essential cause of the currency crisis in Thailand. Finally, one of the main reasons why the crisis became so serious was that BOT could not manage the exchange rate policy on the basis of the correct information about the international financial situation due to the deterioration of internal communication after the bubble burst. Through our analysis we show that the reactions of the domestic entities played an important role indeed in both the development phase and the crisis one, although international factors and path-dependency in the Thai financial system heavily affected the domestic economy.

View full abstract