Abstract
The 1979 GATT Aircraft Agreement was greeted with considerable relief among the American industry. As we have seen, the AIA generally welcomed the GATT accord and regarded it as a good, if not foolproof, agreement protecting US firms from unfair competition. However, the 1980s saw the trade dispute intensify, not subside. By 1982, it was clear that the GATT accord was not going to offer the protection that American firms had hoped. Gradually both the American industry and government began to regard Europe as guilty of violating both the letter and spirit of the accord by continuing to provide Airbus with subsidies.
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Notes
Boeing may have been drawing lessons from the McDonnell-Douglas’ experience with the DC-8. Production of that plane was stopped in favour of the DC-10 in 1970. However, as the DC-8 was not only popular but also a design amenable to modification, many industry observers believe that MDC committed a costly error in investing funds in an all-new DC-10. Given the pronounced learning effects in the industry, MDC could have updated the DC-8 at a fraction of the cost of the DC-10. See Artemis March, ‘The US commercial aircraft industry and its foreign competitors’, MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity: Working Paper, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1989, p. 8 and note 10.
Pierre Muller, Airbus, L’Ambition Européenne, Logique d’Etat, Logique de Marché, Paris: Commissariat Général du Plan and L’Harmattan, 1989, p. 122.
The trade press reported that Delta was disappointed that US firms did not meet the challenge more forcefully. See, Aviation Week and Space Technology, 115(21), 23 Nov. 1981, pp. 30–2. On the reluctance of American firms to develop an all-new plane see Keith Hayward, International Collaboration in Civil Aerospace, London: Frances Pinter, 1986, p. 58.
Keith Hayward, ‘Airbus: twenty years of European collaboration’, International Affairs, 64(1), Winter 1987/88, p. 15.
I. M. Destler, American Trade Politics, 2nd edn, Washington DC and New York: Institute for International Economics and the Twentieth Century Fund, 1992, p. 118.
US International Trade Commission, Foreign Industrial Targeting and Its Effects on US Industries: Phase II, the European Community and Member States, Washington: USGPO, 1984, p. 125; cited in
Congressional Research Service, Effects of Federal Economic Policies on US Industries, Washington: USGPO, 1988, p. 91.
National Research Council, The Competitive Status of the US Civil Aviation Manufacturing Industry, Washington: National Academy Press, 1985.
Patrick Low, Trading Free: the GATT and US Trade Policy, New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1993, pp. 190–202.
Commission of the European Communities, ‘Prospects for the development of new policies: research and development, energy and new technologies’, Bulletin of the European Communities: Supplement 5/83, Brussels: CEC, 1983, p. 8; brackets in original. 69. Ibid., Annex III.
Michel Richonnier, ‘Europe’s decline is not irreversible’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 22 (3), Mar. 1984, p. 240.
Wayne Sandholtz, High-Tech Europe: The Politics of International Cooperation, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, pp. 4, and 308.
Joseph Grieco, Cooperation Among Nations: Europe, America and Non-Tariff Barriers to Trade, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990, p. 82.
C. Michael Aho and Marc Levinson, After Reagan: Confronting the Changed World Economy, New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1988, p. 23.
C. Michael Aho, ‘America and the Pacific century: trade conflict or cooperation?’, International Affairs, 69(1) Winter 1991–92, p. 20.
A generalized effect of the overvalued dollar was to encourage other countries to increasingly rely on export-led growth. See, Andrew Walter, World Power and World Money, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993, p. 222.
Keith Hayward, The World Aerospace Industry: Competition and Collaboration, London: Duckworth and RUSI, 1994, p. 103.
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McGuire, S. (1997). ‘Phoney War’: The Launch of the A320. In: Airbus Industrie. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230372214_6
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