Corinne Gendron
“Visages québecois de la responsabilité sociale corporative”
Dans un sondage sur la gouvernance d’entreprise et la responsabilité sociale réalisé par Vector Research en 2001 pour le compte de la Commission sur la démocratie canadienne et la responsabilisation des entreprises, 72% des répondants affirment qu’une entreprise devrait assumer des responsabilités sociales, au lieu de se limiter à la recherche de profits. Mais l’anallyse permet de découvrir que derrière le consensus autour de la responsabilité sociale de l’entreprise se profile une véritable polarisation derrière cette expression commune, et tout le débat sur la régulation et la gouvernance des acteurs économiques dans un contexte de mondialisation. Nos recherches nous conduisent à penser que la montée du questionnement et du discours sur la responsabilité sociale de l’entreprise participe de la réarticulation des pôles de régulation inhérente au processus de mondialisation, à la montée en puissance des acteurs économiques et à l’instrumentalisation de l’économie par des acteurs sociaux, à travers laquelle est injecté un contenu éthique et politique dans les transactions économiques. La montée de la responsabilité sociale correspond ainsi à une recrudescence des attentes des acteurs sociaux à l’égard d’une institution sociale dont la pertinence chavire au fur et à mesure que le développement se voit réinterprété, et que l’image du développement industriel et de l’idéal de la sur-consommation cède le pas à la visée d’un développement durable peu intensif sur le plan écologique mais dont le contenu symbolique est plus important que jamais. Pour assurer sa légitimité, l’entreprise ne peut plus se contenter d’assumer ses fonctions traditionnelles de production en vue de la consommation, elle doit s’inscrire dans la foulée du nouveau paradigme de développement en voie de consolidation. Cette inscription se traduira fort probablement par des mutations structurelles au sein même de l’entreprise, de ses règles constitutives et de sa formalisation juridique et économique. Elle suppose la conclusion de nouveaux compromis entre les acteurs sociaux, dont la nécessité est bien illustrée par les débats qui font rage sur la place publique. L’émergence et la prolifération des codes de conduite témoignent de cette quête de légitimité, mais se posent aussi en nouvelle modalité de régulation dans le contexte international où les normes de portée sociale sont encore portées par les États Nations. Dans cette communication, nous analysons les représentations sociales de la responsabilité sociale de l’entreprise à partir des mémoires déposés à la Commission des finances publiques en 2002, en vue de clarifier les débats concernant la responsabilité, la gouvernance et la régulation des acteurs et des institutions économiques. La multiplicité des définitions de la responsabilité sociale traduit les conflits sociaux autour de l’autonomie de l’élite économique, la gouvernance des processus de développement, la participation aux institutions économiques et le partage de la richesse dans les sociétés modernes avancées.

Hitoshi Higushi
“International Aspects of Japanese Welfare State
Fiscal Policy”
Public finance and fiscal policy in a broad and narrow sense is conditioned by each country’s position in an economic and political world order. After the Second World War, Japan was incorporated in Pax Americana as a world order. In this paper, I would like to examine Japanese welfare state fiscal policy, which has been strongly affected by United States global policy, focusing on its international aspects and market logic.
The Constitution of Japan, which enacted under the direction of the United States, stipulated demilitarization in Article 9 and the right to life in Article 25. Thus, the state of Japan was to be reconstructed as a “civilian” and welfare state. The former determined Japanese public finance as a comparative “small government” and the latter did not counteract this character because of factors at that time such as low-level population ageing and much dependence of welfare on a company and family. Pax Americana had lightened Japanese burden-sharing of maintenance costs of the world order. The savings was used, through public works and tax reduction, for economic growth and for balancing economic gap between urban and rural areas that economic growth widened. It meant the emergence of the “construction state” regime as a Japanese type welfare state.
Since the decline of Pax Americana and the rise of the Japanese economy clashed between the 1970s and the early 1990s, international pressures on Japan to share the burden of maintenance costs of the world order mounted up. Among Japanese policy efforts attempted in response to the pressures, the most active was Keynesian fiscal policy to stabilize the world economy. The fiscal policy responses, which were also conditioned by the “construction state” regime, together with other factors, transformed Japanese welfare state finance and finally brought it to a heavy crisis and an impasse in the end of the 1990s. Now the state of Japan appears to be transforming from a Japanese type welfare state to a “competition state” based on market logic.

Shinya Imura
“Housing Finance Securitization in the US, Japan, and the Korea: Possibilities of Asian System”
Housing Finance Securitization in the U.S., Japan, and the Korea of the Pan Pacific 3 countries stands on an historical turning point. In the United States, meanwhile the securitized financial instruments called “mortgage backed securities” ( MBS) have already shared more than half of mortgage loan outstanding as the result of interest rate fluctuations, but at the same time the coverage of federal government programs against the markets has reached the level of 70% of the market as a whole, which raised the controversy of the “ nationalized mortgage market” issues.
In Japan, the securitization has appeared as the issues of public and private sectors’ competition. That is, in the midst of economic crisis and the extraordinary low interest rates since 1990s, housing loan has become one of the most important assets yield the income for the major city banks in Japan as well as the government bonds, and they have rushed in this markets, insisting that government direct loan programs should be abolished. In such situation, Japanese administration decided in December 2001 that Government Housing Loan Corporation (GHLC) should be abolished in 5 years, and instead some agencies which carry the securitization of private housing loan assets should be built as a successor of the GHLC.
In Korea, the “asset backed securities” system (ABS system) introduced as the schemes of disposition of non-current loan of the banks which was for getting out of the economic crises under the IMF supervision since 1998. And the subsequent MBSIt has played the important roles also in the housing finance markets in the manner that newly induced mortgage backed securities which packed the loan assets of the National
Housing Fund.
Generally, especially in the micro- economics, securitization plays the roles which ease bank’s interest rates fluctuation risks resulted from the maturity gaps of both side of balance sheet and promotes the restructuring of the assets portfolios through the cutting off the asset themselves and increasing the equity capital ratios. But securitizations have appeared themselves from the different moments and have performed different functions in these three countries. So this
paper traces these common and different aspects of securitization,
and consider the possible Asian optimal seciritized styles in the
housing finance.