Adjustment Strategies for Sustained Competitiveness

Abstract

THE TRENDS discussed in the previous chapter are evidence of a major transformation under way in the international structure of the clothing industry. Declining rates of growth in consumption, stagnant employment levels and an increase in the share of the domestic market captured by foreign suppliers were the early symptoms. They were first observed in either the smaller, open economies of Northern Europe or in the wealthy, larger economies of the United States, the United Kingdom and West Germany, where alternative job opportunities in the high-growth era of the 1960s were able to divert possible social unrest and blunt the political consequences. Over time, the conditions fostering this decline spread sequentially to other countries: France in the early 1970s began to show the same symptoms, as did Japan towards the end of the decade. Only Italy, of all the countries studied, managed to endure this period of nearly twenty years of intense competition and emerge with a strong and viable industry.