The impact of global economy on automobile industry: Comparative study of the United States, Japan and the People's Republic of China. (Volumes I and II)

Production and trade in automobile industry is increasingly globalized. It centers around the world-wide value chains of the manufacturers in the triad, the United States, Japan and Europe. While they compete for technological edge and maximize value-adding activities around the world, the global auto assemblers are re-drawing the international division of labor, re-defining locational advantage for every functional activity and introducing new criteria for participation in the world economy. Global competition is turning the linkages between manufacturers and suppliers into a key determinant of the relative positions of corporations and nations in globalized production and trade.;The manufacturer-supplier linkages, instead of other institutional nexus, such as that linking firms with banks, are selected for investigating the relations of international political economy, because, first, they are the traditional focus for studying the historical evolution of the ideal types of inter-corporate relations in the individual national economy. Adopting the same focus, therefore, seems a natural extension of previous studies. By virtue of their dissimilarity, second, the structural relations provide a target for comparing how the competitive pressures of the global market place impact on each national economy and what policy responses they elicit. This dissertation shows that globalization has necessitated changes in the structural relations in all three economies of the United States, Japan and China despite their differences in ideology, political systems and stages of economic development.;The conflicts surrounding the structural changes in these societies reflect the tension between "techno-nationalist" and "techno-globalist" approaches to managing the competitive pressures of the global economy. As adherents to the territorial conception of comparative advantage and world trade, national governments pursue neo-mercantalist targeting together with the sectorial management of bilateral trade in competition with other national political authorities. In contrast, the corporations that must survive the technological competition have to practice techno-globalism, building trans-border alliances and partnerships while implementing domestic restructuring, in spite of their opportunistic support for bilateral managed trade. The network economy resulting therefrom provides a new avenue for multi-lateral relations among nations in the age of globalization.