Abstract
The past three decades have been ones of increasing interdependence and competition among the industrialised countries of the capitalist world. The international economic system set up by the United States and its allies after the Second World War permitted a rapid growth of world trade. In the 1970s, further reductions in barriers to international trade (in the aggregate) resulted in a widespread increase in the importance of world trade for all the industrial countries. A steady increase in the interpenetration of markets posed serious questions for those firms and industries which could not compete on an international scale. As a result of the reduced barriers to trade, and the inability of specific firms and industries to adapt to this change in the international economy, certain governments found themselves under attack for permitting major domestic industries to be exposed to ‘unfair’ foreign competition. In addition, these governments were criticised for not preventing a decline in the competitiveness of key industries. In some areas it was argued that the economy had become over-specialised and was not likely to provide the sort of financial returns on which growth in national economic prosperity depended.l
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Notes
On the general increase in trade and interdependence, see Centre d’Etudes Prospectives et d’Informations Internationales (CEPII), Economie Mondiale: La Montée des Tensions (Paris: Economica, 1983); French Institute for International Relations, RAMSES: The State of the World Economy (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1982). Literature on specific countries will be cited below.
Judith L. Goldstein, ‘The State, Industrial Interests, and Foreign Economic Policy: American Commercial Policy in the Postwar Period’, paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York, 3–6 Sept. 1981, pp. 19–20.
Details on the experiences and views of specific countries will be given later in the text.
Robert Gilpin, US Power and the Multinational Corporation (New York: Basic Books, 1975).
The author is developing this argument further in a forthcoming book tentatively titled Atlantic Riptides.
Stephan Haggard and Vinod Aggarwal, ‘The Politics of Protection in the U.S. Textile and Apparel Industries’, in John Zysman and Laura Tyson (eds), American Industry in International Competition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983). See also, David Yoffie, Power and Protection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
Leonard Lynn, How Japan Innovates: A Comparison with the United States in the Case of Oxygen Steelmaking (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1982).
Hans Van der Ven, ‘The Politics of Trans-Atlantic Steel Trade’, unpublished manuscript, Harvard Business School, May 1983.
Ibid., viii-13.
Commission of the European Communities, General Objectives Steel 1985, SEC(82) 1564 (Brussels: 28 October 1982).
James P. Womack, Public Policy for a Mature Industrial Sector, PhD dissertation, MIT, September 1982; Gilbert Winham, The Automobile Trade Crisis of 1980 (Halifax, NS: Centre for Foreign Policy Studies, Dalhousie University, 1981).
Boston Consulting Group, Perspectives on Experience (Boston: 1971).
Michael Borrus, James Millstein and John Zysman, International Competition in Advanced Industrial Sectors: Trade and Development in theSemiconductor Industry (Washington, DC: Joint Economic Committee of Congress, 1982).
Semiconductor Industry Association, The Effect of Government Targeting on World Semiconductor Competition (Cupertino, CA, January 1983).
Glenn R. Fong, ‘Project Update: American, Japanese, and European Industrial Policies in Microelectronics: A Preliminary Report of the US Experience in the Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Program’, Harvard Business School, February 1983.
Urban C. Lehner, ‘US-Japan Phone Gear Pact Totters’, Wall Street Journal, 27 July 1983, p. 24.
Les Nouveaux Produits de l’Electronique Grand Public (Paris: Documentation Française, 1978); ‘Europe gangs up on Japanese electronics’, Business Week, 21 March 1983.
Jacques Jublin and Jean-Michel Quatrepoint, French Ordinateurs: de l’affaire Bull a l’assassinat du Plan (Paris: Alain Moreau, 1976).
Giovanni Dosi, Technical Change and Survival: Europe’s Semiconductor Industry (Brighton, UK: Sussex European Research Centre, 1981).
Ira C. Magaziner and Thomas M. Hout, Japanese Industrial Policy (London: Policy Studies Institute, 1980); Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982).
Business Week, 7 March 1983, p. 119; Robert E. Taylor, ‘Reagan to Seek Cut in Damages for Trust Suits’, Wall Street Journal, 29 March 1983, p. 3.
Frédéric Jenny, ‘La politique industrielle de la France’, paper delivered at a conference on industrial policy and structural adjustments at Isveimer, Naples, 21–2 April 1983; Andrew Black, ‘The Industrial Policy of the Federal Republic of Germany’, same conference; Alfredo del Monte, ‘La politica industriale in Italia’, same conference.
An example is MITI, Vision of Industry in the Eighties (Tokyo: March 1980).
Stephen S. Cohen, Modern Capitalist Planning: The French Model (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969); Sol Estrin and Peter Holmes, French Planning in Theory and Practice (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983).
See the annual reports of the National Economic Development Council.
Gilbert Winham, ‘Robert Strauss, the MTN, and the Control of Faction’, Journal of World Trade Law, 14 (September/October 1980) p. 384; Michael Moritz and Barrett Seaman, Going for Broke: The Chrysler Story (New York: Doubleday, 1981).
For a similar argument, see Peter Hall, ‘Patterns of Economic Policy among the European States: An Organization Approach’, in Steven Bornstein, David Held and Joel Krieger (eds), The State in Capitalist Europe (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983).
Theodore Lowi, The End of Liberalism (New York: Norton, 1969) pp. 133–41; Ira Millstein and Salem Katsh, ‘The Limits of Corporate Power’, unpublished manuscript, 1980.
Johnson, MITI; Kent Calder, ‘Opening Japan’, Foreign Policy, no. 47 (Summer 1982) pp. 82–97.
Black, ‘Industrial Policy’; Jeremiah Riemer, ‘Alterations in the Design of Model Germany: Critical Innovations in the Policy Machinery for Economic Steering’, in Andre Markovits (ed.), The Political Economy of West Germany (New York: Praeger, 1982).
Black, ‘Industrial Policy’, Riemer, ‘Alterations’; Hans-Rudolf Peters, Grundlagen der Mesooekonomie und Strukturpolitik (Bonn: Haupt UTB, 1980); Christopher Wilkinson, ‘Trends in Industrial Policy in the EC: Theory and Practice’, paper presented at a meeting at the Centre for European Policy Studies, Brussels, June 1983.
Jenny, ‘La politique industrielle’; John Zysman, Governments, Markets and Growth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); Stephen S. Cohen, ‘French Economic Strategy and the Crisis’, paper delivered at a conference on industrial sectors in the world market, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, 1–2 September 1982.
Ezra Suleiman, Politics, Power and Bureaucracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974).
For a sample of writings criticising the Gaullist économic policies see Jacques Attali, La nouvelle economie française (Paris: Flammarion, 1978); Alain Boublil, Le socialisme industriel (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1977); Andre Grjebine, La nouvelle économie internationale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1980); and Jean Marcel Jeanneney, Pour un nouveau protectionnisme (Paris: Seuil, 1978).
‘Aprés dirigisme, le délugé’, The Economist, 7 May 1983, p. 85.
Stephen Blank, ‘Britain’, in Peter Katzenstein (ed.), Between Power and Plenty (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978).
See CEPII, chs. 1–3.
Stephen Haggard and Chung-In Moon, ‘The Korean State in the International Economy: Liberal, Dependent, or Mercantile?’, in John Ruggie (ed.), The Antinomies of Interdependence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Stephan Haggard and Tunjen Cheng, ‘State Strategies, Local and Foreign Capital in the Gang of Four’, paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, 2 September 1983; Jeffrey Hart, ‘Industrial Change in the Trilateral Countries: Implications for the NICs’, same meeting.
‘Asian Lessons for Latins’, The Economist, 4 June 1983, p. 68.
World Bank, World Development Report 1983 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) p. 18.
Paul Volcker, ‘How Serious is U.S. Bank Exposure?’, Challenge, 26 (May/June 1983) p. 15.
Terri Karl, ‘Why Oil Exporters Overborrow’, paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, 4 September 1983.
I am summarising here the content of several presentations by Steven Dizard, Jonathan Aronson, Richard Cooper, and Benjamin J. Cohen on the question of North—South debt rescheduling problems at a seminar on North—South Relations at Harvard University, Center for International Affairs, Spring 1983.
See the several articles on the Caribbean Basin Initiative in Foreign Policy, no. 47 (Summer 1982).
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© 1990 Dennis C. Pirages and Christine Sylvester
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Hart, J.A. (1990). Interdependence and Increased Competition among the Industrialised Countries: Implications for the Developing World. In: Pirages, D.C., Sylvester, C. (eds) Transformations in the Global Political Economy. Macmillan International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10373-7_5
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