Do the Japanese count financial manipulation as “product”, like the US does?
Ayup. The chatter is that it’s MITI pushing Honda to take over Nissan and Mitsu. Maybe MITI has morphed from long range planning, to protecting the vested interests? How many “zombie” companies have been kept afloat in Japan since the 90s? How very USian of them!
/sarcasm
Possible, but seems unlikely. The key benefits of a market economy are price discovery and alignment of incentives. Central planned systems generally lack those features, and even megacorporations still rely heavily on markets to provide them.
For example, Walmart gets to know exactly how much each of its products cost because it engages in market transactions with all of its suppliers (not necessarily “level playing field transactions,” but market transactions nonetheless). Those suppliers know what it costs to make their goods because of market transactions. And their customers signal their price points because they’re engaging in market transactions.
And everyone’s incentives are aligned to reveal that price information: the suppliers want the highest price they can get, Walmart wants the lowest price they can get, and each has an incentive to be accurate in getting the highest/lowest price that still makes sense for the transaction to take place. If it genuinely doesn’t make sense for Walmart to buy a product, or a producer to make it, it won’t happen - but in a central planned economy, those incentives collapse and people just do what makes them best off within the planning bureaucracy.