The Japan-U. S. Relations in the Global Restructuring Period(PAPERS READ AT THE AUTUMN CONFERENCE SYMPOSIUM, 1990 : The Post-war Japanese Capitalism in Global and Historical Perspective)

Abstract

In the early 1970s the world economy failed into the structural crises with the simultaneous spread of stagnation and inflation pressure. The restructuring process results from the effort to supersede those crises that have affected the capitalist world economy since the early 1970s. The aim of this paper is to make clear the American type of the restructuring process in contrast to the Japanese one. In the post-Vietnam 1970s the defense procurements dropped rapidly to a level not seen since World War II. So the defense industries were forced to shift from the defense demands to the civilian demands. The microelectronics industries which had depended upon defense business grew sharpy in the civilian area owing to MPU invented by Intel. The American government has aspired to resolve their crises and to restructure the American economy by encouraging the growth of the microelectronics industries. But instead of making new investments in innovative products and process which could assure them a secure share of their market in the future, modern American managers in contrast to Japanese managers tried to expand their companies through M&A and the globalization strategy. They benefit from substituting cheaper foreign labor for U.S. workers and cheaper foreign parts for those with a U.S. label. Aa a result, U.S. companies lost out to foreign producers. In the U.S. the hollowing process has proceeded.