| NJ5 said: I'm not doubting what you say, except perhaps for the last paragraph. What interest do these networks have in helping competitors? Do you have a source for that?
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Oh, the keiretsu compete ferociously with each other, so it's not anti-competitive. The genius of the system is that it creates a social buffer which helps all firms during crises, including supply networks. Most other developed countries have variations of this strategy - Germany and France regularly intervene to bail out a strategic industry or firm, e.g. Only the US has been crazy enough not to do this, though times change - the bailout of Morgan Stanley, GM and Ford means we're becoming more like the rest of the world.
Some useful sources: Michael Gerlach's "Alliance Capitalism" is one of the best academic accounts of the keiretsu, Robert Friedman's "The Misunderstood Miracle" has good details on the complexity of Japan's local developmental state.
I also have some of the shareholding data for East Asian firms up here: http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/keiretsu.html
(This is 2003 data, a bit dated, haven't had time to update, but the patterns are roughly the same today.)
