『アジアの資本形成とマネージング・エージェンシー・システム』

Business corporations in Asian countries, particularly in India were managed and controlled through Managing Agency System. But nature of this system has still remained in the vague. Most scholars argue that this institution emerged and grew in order to overcome shortages of entrepreneurs, managerial talents, financial resources and technology in these countries. Reviewing critically such arguement, we propose a fresh hypothesis that the substance of this system is to ensure the entrepreneurs the hereditary control of management and prior claim to profit of their concerns. Entrepreneurs here do not intend to manage their concerns directly. Rather they enter into a contract of Managing Agency Agreement with the very company which they promote and nurse. They carefully ensure their hereditary control and prior claim to profit by regulating a long tenure of management and a high piece-rate commission as their remuneration in these agreements. In practice, it was extremely difficult for any one to modify the terms inserted by them. Therefore, by virtue of the Agency Agreement, entrepreneurs could not only maintain the control of management but also absorb the considerable portion of profit for long time with far less share-holding. Especially, before the amendment of Indian Company Law in 1936, protective share-holding could be astonishingly small in case of companies managed by first-class entrepreneurs. Concentration movement through such a system presents quite a unique feature. Entrepreneurs promote companies one by one and they appoint themselves as the Managing Agents of their companies. Repeating the same process, they begin to concentrate a number of companies. Now they are made into a holding company or apex institution of big houses without protective share-holding of the subsidiary. In India, by the First World War some big houses like Andrew Yule, Bird・Heilger etc., were firmly established in this way. In fact, they concentrated a large number of companies particularly in the fields of tea, coal, jute and light railway. These fields were rather export-oriented ones which were characteristic to the typical British big houses. In striking contrast to them, Tata, this Indian big house controlled rather import-substituting concerns like cotton mills, iron and steel, chemicals and electric power. In Malay Peninsula, a few Europian big houses like Guthrie and Harrisons & Crosfield, were commanding numerous rubber companies through the same institution. The critical analysis of such an important system may produce some new directions to Asian economic studies.