"This book provides an institutional, flow of funds, theoretical, and statistical overview of the PSS and FILP. It evaluates the contributions these institutions have made to Japan's economic growth and the problems these institutions create as Japan attempts to modernize its financial and economic system. The book provides a positive analysis of the role played by the PSS and the FILP in Japan's impressive growth from 1950 to the late 1980s and the economic and financial distress of the 1990s. The authors evaluate the reforms started in 1998 and provide a normative view of what direction reform of the PSS and the FILP needs to take if the goals of the 1996 Big Bang announcement are to be realized. Despite the setbacks in the late 1990s and the first years of the new century, the 1996 Big Bang remains the operating framework for financial reform in Japan. "--BOOK JACKET.