Public Policy Frameworks: A Diverse Landscape

This chapter analyses the different public policy frameworks of Japan, South Korea, the US, and Western Europe.1 There are two important aspects of these countries’ policy frameworks which are relevant here. The first concerns their diversity. This is largely the product of the countries’ different long-term priorities in the policy arena, and their very different histories. As we shall see in the following discussion, Japan’s and South Korea’s priorities have long been very different to those of Western Europe and the US. This leads us nicely on to the second point, which concerns the effectiveness of the different policy frameworks in terms of promoting technological innovation. Because of where they have focused their priorities, the policy frameworks of Japan and South Korea have proved far more successful at promoting technological innovation than those of Western Europe and the US. The implications have been profound. Primarily because of the enormous success which Japan enjoyed during the 1980s, Western Europe and the US changed certain elements of their own policy frameworks in the expectation that this would improve their record of technological innovation. At least in the field of electronics, these changes have not had the desired effects. When a country is faced with a major competitive challenge, changing elements of its policy framework is one of the usual measures adopted to address a problem of this nature.