Localisation of Japanese subsidiaries in Southeast Asia

The success story of Japanese firms, both in their home country and their overseas subsidiaries, has been the focus of comparative management research in the 1970s and early 1980s. Several scholars attributed the impressive productivity gains in Japanese industries to the basic principles of Japanese management. Further, they advocated the adoption of these principles by American and European businesses to solve employee morale and productivity problems. However, in recent years, the validity of the “happy worker” hypothesis in explaining the effectiveness of Japanese management has been seriously questioned. In fact, the results of several empirical studies indicate that Japanese firms are facing manpower management problems both at home and in their overseas subsidiaries. The main purpose of this article is to identify and discuss the Japanese management problems of overseas subsidiaries, based on several empirical studies of Japanese overseas subsidiaries undertaken by the authors of this article and other scholars during the last 17 years (1968 to 1985). These studies are:

Localisation Problems of Japanese Subsidiaries Overseas: A Comparative Study in Southeast-Asian Countries.

A comparative study of American, Japanese and local firms in Taiwan.

A comparative study of American, European and Japanese multinationals' subsidiaries in Brazil, Peru, India, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand.

A comparative study of American, German, and Japanese multinations in the United States, Western European countries, Australia, and Japan.

A comparative study of upper-level Japanese and American managers of subsidiaries of Japanese firms in the United States.

A comparative study of subsidiaries of American and Japanese multinationals in Singapore.

An intensive case study of a Japanese subsidiary in Australia.

     

The growth of point source plumes at Rayleigh numbers up to 108 and Prandtl numbers up to 1000

Two-dimensional numerical simulations were conducted of the growth of thermal plumes from a point heat source at Rayleigh numbers up to 108 and Prandtl numbers up to 1000. Scaling the convection equations by the free fall velocity rather than the thermal diffusivity, increased the Prandtl number range available to numerical simulation by one order of magnitude from Prandtl number 100 to 1000. We present animations showing how the plumes grow with time for different Prandtl numbers. Plumes with Prandtl numbers around 7 (water) were found to be unstable to sinuous instabilities; whereas those at Prandtl numbers of 1000 had straight stems and fewer sinuous instabilities. Wavelet analysis was used to analyze the scales at which plumes initiated, and the scales at which sinuous instabilities occurred. The scale of both the plume structures and instabilities was found to decrease with Prandtl number.     

The accountability demand for information in China and the US – A research note

This study replicated Evans, Heiman-Hoffman and Rau’s (hereafter, EHR) [Evans, J. H., III, Heiman-Hoffman, V. B., & Rau, S. (1994). The accountability demand for information. Journal of Management Accounting Research, 6, 24–42] US study, using Chinese MBA students as participants. The Chinese students acted as owners and selected one of two control systems. One control system requires truthful reporting and the other control system permits the manager to falsify the report. The two systems have the same expected payoff to the owner if the owner believes that the manager will always lie when given the opportunity. If the owner believes that there is any probability that the manager will tell the truth, then the more Lenient System has the higher expected payoff. We compared the US versus Chinese control system choices, and examined whether the Chinese owner-participants would be willing to sacrifice wealth to get accountability. The results indicate that a significant proportion of Chinese participants do have an accountability demand for information, and that this proportion is at least as high as that of the US participants in EHR.     

Maintaining competitiveness of aviation hub: Empirical evidence of visitors to China via Hong Kong by air transport

Prior studies have not extensively researched and explored the key determinants (aviation and tourism attributes) that could affect Hong Kong’s competitiveness as a transit hub for international visitors using Hong Kong as a stopover to Chinese cities when travelling by air. This study adds to that knowledge to empirically investigate Hong Kong’s eight major tourist source markets (Germany, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, the UK, and the US), and also provides an insight to policy-makers in Hong Kong to help them understand the factors that influence Hong Kong’s aviation hub competitiveness and tourism development. The findings of the study suggest that increased air transport capacity from foreign countries and Hong Kong to China, trade volumes between China and its trading partners, air transport costs, and the global financial crisis are the key factors affecting the number of visitors to China by air passing through Hong Kong as their preferred stopover. The policy implications of the findings are discussed.     

An Information-Based Model of Foreign Direct Investment: The Gains from Trade Revisited

Foreign direct investment (FDI) is observed to be a predominant form of capital flows to emerging economies, especially when they are liquidity-constrained internationally during a global financial crisis. The financial aspects of FDI are the focus of this paper. We analyze the problem of channelling domestic savings into productive investment in the presence of asymmetric information between the managing owners of firms and other portfolio stakeholders. We explore the role played by FDI in reviving equity-financed capital investment for economies plagued by such information problems. In the presence of information asymmetry, the paper identifies, however, how FDI gives rise to foreign overinvestment as well as domestic undersaving. The gains from trade argument (applied to intertemporal trade) is re-examined in this case of informational-asymmetry-driven FDI. We show that the gains could be sizable when the domestic credit market is either under-developed or failing as a result of a financial crisis. But with a well-functioning domestic credit market, the gains turn into losses. Surprisingly, capital may flow into the country even when the autarkic marginal productivity of capital in the domestic economy falls short of the world rate of interest. In such a situation, capital should have efficiently flown out rather than in, and FDI is a social loss-generating phenomenon.     

The Effect of Clients’ Auditing Experience and Concession-Timing Strategies on Auditor-Client Negotiations

The objective of this study was to examine the role of auditing experience, in auditor-client negotiations, in determining the value of the negotiated outcome. We also assessed whether it alters the effect of auditors’ concession timing-strategies on this outcome. Using an experimental method, we selected our respondents from two groups of financial officers (clients), those with and those without auditing experience. To determine the effect of the financial officers’ auditing experience and the concession-timing strategies adopted by their auditors, we measured the magnitude of the audit adjustment in an auditor-client negotiation. Our findings showed that auditing experience and concession-timing strategies affect the magnitude of the audit adjustments separately, but that auditing experience has no moderating effect on the relationship between concession timing and the final audit adjustment of the financial officers. A practical implication of this study is that it identified the ways in which auditor-client negotiations actually work. It is important that auditors obtain background information about their clients before they start a negotiation, as this information may affect its outcome.     

The Problem of Viscoelastic Relaxation of the Earth Solved by a Matrix Eigenvalue Approach Based on Discretization in Grid Space

Viscoelasticity is a geophysical process which operates over intermediate timescales between a few years to millions of years, depending on the ambient thermal conditions of the self-gravitating spherical planet. Topography undulations with time represent geological signatures to both the internal and external loading processes, such as post-glacial rebound, volcanic eruptions, sedimentary loading, meteoritic impacts and mountain building. The span of relaxation timescales or relaxation spectrum in a viscoelastic spherical body has traditionally been determined by employing the Laplacian transform method and the correspondence principle relating the elastic solution to its viscoelastic counterpart. We have devised a novel approach based on the method of lines in which the equations at each angular order in the spherical harmonic expansion are discretized in the radial co-ordinate. The finite-dimensional space spanned by the discretized points in the radial direction of the planetary model then forms the basis of a matrix Eigenvalue problem. The Eigenvalues can be computed very fast because of the availability of public domain software. We can, for instance, compute the entire range of viscoelastic relaxation with computational times from 0.05 to 50 sec using only 30 to 300 radial grid points. The models can have both realistic density and elastic parameter profiles, derived from seismology. We show results here for complicated viscosity profiles with an asthenosphere in the upper mantle and a viscosity hill in the middle portion of the lower mantle. Because of the rapidity of the code, we may use this new method for exploring non-linear inversion problems by parameter sweeping.     

HRM Under Guided Economic Development: The Singapore Experience

The article begins with the three stages of Singapore's economic development as the context from which the local labour-management relations system emerged. This is followed by a discussion of the institutional framework under which the government managed to attractmulti-national enterprises to provide the necessary capital, technology, management expertise, and access to international markets - conditions required for the attainment of its economic goals. However, while the government did deliver a disciplined, hard-working and trained labour force, it also ensured that workers received a share of the wealth generated in the labour process. In the second part of the article, local employment practices, as well as the trends for future development are discussed.