Financial-sector regulation — banking separation, capital requirements, cross-border activity rules, derivatives oversight.
Trade policy openness — tariffs, non-tariff barriers, FTAs, industrial protection.
Product-market regulation, entry barriers, licensing burdens, network-industry regulation, price controls.
Anglo-Saxon-template financial-sector liberalisation programme announced by PM Hashimoto on 11 November 1996, phased to April 2001. Removed the Article 65 Glass-Steagall-equivalent separation between banking, securities, and insurance; revised the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Law effective 1 April 1998 abolishing prior-notification requirements for outward investment; liberalised brokerage commissions (fully deregulated October 1999); opened securities-settlement, OTC derivatives, and investment-trust distribution to banks; established holding- company structures for financial groups; created Financial Supervisory Agency (June 1998) spun off from MoF.
Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.
Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".
Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.