Confounding productivity and competitiveness: A rejoinder to the comment, “how well is the United States competing?”
✍ Scribed by Maria Papadakis
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1996
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 461 KB
- Volume
- 15
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0276-8739
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Well sth he
United States Competing?"
The authors in Johnston and Chinn [1996], a comment on my 1994 article, have selectively misrepresented (or determinedly misunderstood) my conceptualizations, analysis, and argument about U.S. competitiveness. I believe they did so to construct and knock down a straw man. In this Rejoinder I will show that I have not committed the offenses that are alleged, that the authors' own productivity analysis is not compelling counterevidence, and that sector-specific policies may be warranted, as discussed in my original study. My argument here will be framed in four sections: (1) the goals and findings of my original article;
(2) what is competitiveness (again)?; ( 3 ) the role of productivity; and (4) conclusions.
GOALS AND FINDINGS OF THE ORIGINAL ANALYSIS
My original analysis addressed uncertainty about whether an intrinsic inability to compete afflicted U . S . industry during the 1980s. While we had a very good sense of changes in U S . performance in terms of productivity, trade, and growth, we still had "limited insight into competitive strength as businesses understand it: the ability to prevail in product markets" [1994, p. 21. Policy debate and proposed solutions polarized around the intrinsic (or microeconomic) noncompetitiveness of U .S. business (e.g., management practices, innovation, and productivity) and the macroeconomic problems of exchange rates, trade dynamics, and the federal budget deficit.
My goal was to look at the competitive performance of U.S. industry as it derived from intrinsic abilities, since that is where the empirical work is most limited and flawed. In doing so, I wanted to keep microeconomic and macroconomic influences distinct from one another because the causal dynamics of these forces are different, as are their policy implications. Indeed, I specifically stated that "To detect a competitiveness crisis, we need to identify performance patterns that distinguish between systemic effects . . .