Implications of Target Costing and its International Application

Abstract

Cost design, which focuses on cost reduction at the stage of planning rather than production, has become well known as a representative type of Japanese management accounting since the 1970s, although interest in it has declined recently in the light of the Japanese economic crisis. As it has been extensively described in other articles (Nishimura, 1995, 1997, 2000a) only the fundamental aspects of cost design, which the Toyota Motor Corporation started to develop in the latter half of the 1960s and systematized in the 1970s (Tanaka, 1993), will be summarized in this section.