Anglo-American Contributions to Japanese and German Corporate Governance after World War Two

After over 50 years, it is pertinent at a time when corporate governance (CG) is a controversial subject, especially in ‘transition’ economies, to reflect on the immediate post-World War Two period as potentially a miniature ‘laboratory experiment’ in CG. In this period, occupying US and UK military governments were in a very strong position to reform CG in Japan and Germany respectively, in their own images. It turns out that many of their regulatory changes were subsequently modified or even reversed by domestic governments and market forces. In some subtle ways, however, the occupations laid a basis for rapid post-war economic recovery in Germany and Japan.