Commentaries
can meaningfully translate it to the outside. This is also a training skill of some
significance.
Academic partnerships
Any company looking for, say, a programme of tree planting to offset carbon dioxide
emissions `in-house' [via emissions trading or the clean development mechanism (see
Grubb et al, 1999)] would be wise to contact an academic department of excellence to
find out the best way to do the task with maximum social gain and least social
disruption. The best departments would also be wise to discover local practitioners
who have plenty of forehand experience of land rights and power networks. So there
may be a triple partnership in prospect, between corporations and impacted commun-
ities, between this combination and the companies involved, and between that combi-
nation in turn and governments locally and nationally.
All this may appear too naively optimistic. Few companies have really yet shown
their corporate social responsibility hand. However, the drivers mentioned earlier in
this commentary are very real. There is great scope for approaching companies and
sounding out pilot schemes for mutual advantage. For the corporation, good social
investment now to offset a possible reputational disaster later will buy rich dividends.
Think of Norst Hydro Seafoods. It has lost over 50% of its profits because of the
controversy over infectious salmon amnesia in farmed salmon in Scotland. This was
an avoidable calamity if the pressures to pack fish into more confined spaces had been
offset by listening to the screams of the pressure groups and local people. Now Norst
Hydro wants to get out of the fish farming business—but cannot find a buyer.
Tim O'Riordan
References
Elkington J, 1998 Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line for Business (Capstone Press, London)
Grubb M, Vrolijk C, Brack D, 1999 The Kyoto Protocol: A Guide and an Assessment (Earthscan,
London)
Mendez S, Parnell J5Wasserstrom R, 1998, “Seeking common ground: petroleum and indigenous
peoples in Equador's Amazon'' Environment 40(5) 12^ 19
O'Riordan T, 1999, “Environmental science on the move'', in Environmental Science for
Environmental Management 2nd edition, Ed. T O'Riordan (Longman, Harlow, Essex) pp 16 ^ 32
Shell Corporation, 1999 People Planet and Profits: An Act of Commitment Shell Corporates, Shell
Mex House, Strand, London WC2 0DX
The East Asian banking sector—overweight?
A lot has been written about the role of the banking sector in East Asian economies.
Most of the literature on the subject is devoted to Japan (Kaplan, 1997), but we can
also find works on other countries of the region (World Bank, 1993). The basic
conclusions of the existing research are that in East Asia the banking sectors are large
relative to the size of the economies, and bank intermediation dominates other parts of
the financial markets. This dominance of or reliance on banking is treated as a
characteristic feature of East Asian economies and contrasts with the financial struc-
tures of Anglo-American countries.
In the 1990s the terms ‘dominance’ and ‘reliance’ have been replaced more and
more frequently with the words ‘overdominance’ and ‘overreliance’. This negative inter-
pretation is connected with the general economic slowdown in Japan and above all
with the Asian financial crisis which started in the middle of 1997. This is because the
relatively large role of the banking sector, working in combination with other political
and socioeconomic conditions, has been recognised as one of the major causes of the
economic problems (for example, see Krugman, 1998). A simplified reasoning behind