Author: Damian Merciar

Damian Merciar is Managing Director of Merciar Business Consulting, http://www.merciar.com, a niche business economics consultancy founded in 1998. He has over twenty years experience in the areas of commercial Business Strategy. He is experienced in the transition environments of nationalized to private sector state utilities and the senior practice of commercial management, advisorial consultancy, and implementation. He has carried out policy advisory work for government ministries and been an adviser to institutional bodies proposing changes to government. He holds an MSc Economics from the University of Surrey’s leading Economics department and an MBA from the University of Kent. Also attending the leading University in the Middle East, studying International Relations and Language, for which he won a competitive international scholarship, and has a BA (Hons) in Economic History and Political Economy from the University of Portsmouth. He is currently based in London.

inheritance tax changes as a lever for structural change in Japan

dduane's avatarPRACTICAL STOCK INVESTING

value investing and corporate change…

One of the basic tenets of value investing in the US is that when a company is performing badly, one of two favorable events will occur:  either the board of directors will make changes to improve results; or if the board is unwilling or incapable of doing so, a third party will seize control and force improvements to be made.

…hasn’t worked in Japan

Not so in Japan, as many Westerners have learned to their sorrow over the thirty years I have been watching the Japanese economy/market.

Two reasons for this:

—culturally it’s abhorrent for any person of low status (e.g., a younger person, a woman or a foreigner) to interfere in any way with–or even to comment less than 100% favorably on–a person of high status.  So change from within isn’t a real possibility.

–in the early 1990s, as the sun was setting…

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African and Asian leaders call for new development bank

developmenttruths's avatardevelopmenttruths

Leaders of emerging African and Asian countries are calling for the establishment of a new development to rival the World Bank.

At the 60th commemoration of the Asian African Conference in Jakarta, Indonesia last month a number of leaders agreed that, to succeed, there is a need for a new bank, totally separate from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) because the two can no longer be trusted to fully fund development infrastructure projects.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo, the conference host, said those who still insisted that global economic problems could only be solved through the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and Asian Development Bank were clinging to “obsolete ideas”.

In his opening statement, Widodo said that African and Asian countries felt a global injustice because the developed world is reluctant to change the status quo:

“The view that the world economic problems can only be solved by…

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