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Automobiles in international trade: regime change or persistence?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

James A. Dunn Jr
James A. Dunn Jr
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, Camden.
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Abstract

The concept of a “regime” is frequently used to describe and explain behavior in international political economy. Peter Cowhey and Edward Long, attempting to test theories of surplus capacity and hegemonic decline, advanced a version of a regime governing international trade in automobiles which was fundamentally liberal from 1966 to 1975, but then collapsed into protectionism. Their diagnosis is mistaken, however, because the trade regime for autos was neither as liberal as they assert during the 1950s and 1960s, nor as protectionist as they believe it has become in the 1980s. The discussion focuses on a new definition of the auto trade regime based on four fundamental rules that have persisted since the 1950s. By examining data on auto imports since 1955 on a region-by-region basis, it becomes clear that the trade expansion of the postwar years was not based on a global liberalization of the trade regime, but on carefully managed regional arrangements that favored imports within the region, or extra-regional imports that did not threaten domestic producers. The flurry of restraints on Japanese imports in recent years is not a collapse into protectionism, but a reinforcement of the fundamental regime rules. The auto industry case illustrates the tendency of analysts to underestimate protectionist elements in industry trade regimes and to overestimate the amount of changes that take place in their fundamental rules.

Type
Articles
Information
International Organization , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , Spring 1987 , pp. 225 - 252
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1987

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References

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71. The three International Policy Forums that were organized by the MIT Future of the Automobile Program are excellent examples of this type of meeting. They took place annually over a three-year period. They were held, successively, in the United States, Japan, and Europe, and they brought together the same group of high level auto executives, labor leaders, government officials, consultants, and researchers for three days of intensive discussions on issues that had been selected and prepared in advance by the project staff. At the forums and in discussions between forums, these leaders were eventually able to hammer out positions on even the most controversial issues of government trade policy-issues that had initially been divisive. For a complete list of the participants see Altshuler, et al., The Future of the Automobile, Appendix B. For another example of a multinational effort to come to grips with the “rules of the game” in a changing world, see Cole, Robert E. and Yakushiji, Taizo, eds., The American and Japanese Auto Industries in Transition: Report of the Joint U.S.-Japan Automotive Study (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1984)Google Scholar.