Functions of legal business forms and development of economy and society - A comparaive study of Asian countries

2016 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26380455
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Management
• Research Institution: The University of Tokyo
• Principal Investigator: SHIMIZU Takashi 東京大学, 大学院総合文化研究科, 准教授 (00334300)
• Co-Investigator(Renkei-kenkyūsha): KAJIMA Jun 横浜国立大学, 大学院国際社会科学研究院, 准教授 (50463899) ; ITO Miho 神田外語大学, 外国語学部, 講師 (90466821) ; ITO Asei 東京大学, 社会科学研究所, 准教授 (90466821)
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2017-03-31
• Keywords: 経営組織 / 会社形態 / 経済発展 / 株式会社 / 会社法

Outline of Final Research Achievements

The purpose of this research is to investigate how legal forms of business, such as corporations or partnerships, are developed and how they influence the development of economy and society. In order to tackle this purpose, we examined the process s of the development of four Asian countries, that is, Japan, China, Vietnam and Korea. From our empirical study, we found that, in Japan, the corporate form was used mainly by big business and the partnership and limited partnership forms were used by small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), but the use of latter two forms became less popular before World War II. After WWII, SMEs started to use the corporate form to gain the credibility after World War II. Moreover, we also found that the change of the legal forms from the partnership and limited partnership forms to the corporate form was also seen in Korea. We also tried to construct the general model of the development of legal business forms based on our empirical study.

Free Research Field

経営学