Raymond Vernon

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The world’s multinational enterprises face a spell of rough weather, political economist Ray Vernon argues, not only from the host countries in which they have established their subsidiaries, but also from their home countries. Such enterprises—a few thousand in number, including Microsoft, Toyota, IBM, Siemens, Samsung, and others—now generate about half of the world’s industrial output and half of the world’s foreign trade; so any change in the relatively benign climate in which they have operated over the past decade will create serious tensions in international economic relations. The warnings of such a change are already here. In the United States, interests such as labor are increasingly hostile to what they see as the costs and uncertainties of an open economy. In Europe, those who want to preserve the social safety net and those who feel that the net must be dismantled are increasingly at odds. In Japan, the talk of “hollowing out” takes on a new urgency as the country’s “lifetime employment” practices are threatened and as public and private institutions are subjected to unaccustomed stress. The tendency of multinationals in different countries to find common cause in open markets, strong patents and trademarks, and international technical standards has been viewed as a loss of national sovereignty and a weakening of the nation-state system, producing hostile reactions in home countries. The challenge for policy makers, Vernon argues, is to bridge the quite different regimes of the multinational enterprise and the nation-state. Both have a major role to play, and yet must make basic changes in their practices and policies to accommodate each other.

In a rapidly shrinking world, governments everywhere find themselves increasingly obliged to deal with international economic issues. When dealing with such issues, their processes of decisionmaking prove strikingly different from those employed in the handling of political or strategic problems. This unique volume by Raymond Vernon, Debora L. Spar, and Glenn Tobin provides a close-up view of the decisionmaking process within the U. S. establishment as it has wrestled with a series of greatly publicized economic issues in recent years. The book synthesizes a literature that has been accumulating over three decades, deriving from this literature a model of the processes of decisionmaking in the field of U. S. foreign economic policy. Five detailed case studies are presented, each covering a major economic plan or agreement that raised significant controversy. Since the process by which economic decisions are reached involves institutions and characteristics quite different from those encountered in political decisionmaking, Iron Triangles and Revolving Doors emphasizes the persistent regularities to be found in the United States when it comes to economic decisionmaking. The opening chapter offers a model of the characteristics of the foreign economic policymaking process. The next five chapters examine the U. S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement; the battle over the codevelopment of the FSX fighter plane with Japan; the problem of international debt and the creation of the Brady plan; and U. S. trade policy and security export controls in light of the Toshiba-Kongsberg affair. Each of these cases is linked to the overall model of U. S. economic policy presented by the authors. This volume will be an excellent text for university or graduate courses in foreign economic policy, U. S. foreign policy, and international political economy. It will also be of interest to political scientists, economists, government officials, policy analysts, and others looking for insights into economic decisionmaking.

In a rapidly shrinking world, governments everywhere find themselves increasingly obliged to deal with international economic issues. When dealing with such issues, their processes of decisionmaking prove strikingly different from those employed in the handling of political or strategic problems. This unique volume by Raymond Vernon, Debora L. Spar, and Glenn Tobin provides a close-up view of the decisionmaking process within the U. S. establishment as it has wrestled with a series of greatly publicized economic issues in recent years. The book synthesizes a literature that has been accumulating over three decades, deriving from this literature a model of the processes of decisionmaking in the field of U. S. foreign economic policy. Five detailed case studies are presented, each covering a major economic plan or agreement that raised significant controversy. Since the process by which economic decisions are reached involves institutions and characteristics quite different from those encountered in political decisionmaking, Iron Triangles and Revolving Doors emphasizes the persistent regularities to be found in the United States when it comes to economic decisionmaking. The opening chapter offers a model of the characteristics of the foreign economic policymaking process. The next five chapters examine the U. S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement; the battle over the codevelopment of the FSX fighter plane with Japan; the problem of international debt and the creation of the Brady plan; and U. S. trade policy and security export controls in light of the Toshiba-Kongsberg affair. Each of these cases is linked to the overall model of U. S. economic policy presented by the authors. This volume will be an excellent text for university or graduate courses in foreign economic policy, U. S. foreign policy, and international political economy. It will also be of interest to political scientists, economists, government officials, policy analysts, and others looking for insights into economic decisionmaking.

This wide-ranging collection of previously published articles by Raymond Vernon reflects a portion of the diverse subjects on which he has worked during his career. In the past 20 years, the author has pioneered the study of two major economic institutions which have played important roles in today's global economy: the multinational corporation and the state-owned enterprise. His recent thoughts on these subjects are well-represented in this volume. Co-published with the Harvard Center for International Affairs.

This is the key volume in the New York Metropolitan Region Study. It is a synthesis and interpretation of the seven specialized books that have already been published and the one that is still awaiting publication. Here, at last, with a depth of perspective made possible by the author's familiarity with the unpublished as well as the published findings of the other participants in the Study, is the whole picture--New York's busy and varied economy as it is now, as it has been, and as it is likely to be twenty-five years from now. Beginning with the visible present, Mr. Vernon with swift strokes lays bare the essentials of the economic history of the New York Region. He shows how its industries grew out of one another, the part played by labor, the early crucial role of the port, and the later crucial role of "clustering" that enables firms to share common facilities. He discusses the Region's advantages and disadvantages for different kinds of business and industry, the interrelation between the jobs in the Region and the people who live in it. He traces the movement of jobs geographically in and out of the Region as a whole, and also outward within the Region, relating this outward movement to such developments as the thinning-out of population in mid-city tenements and the continuing boom in suburban split-levels. He analyzes the problems besetting the multitude of local governments in the Region, and the crisis of commuting and rapid transit services. Finally he projects the metropolis of 1985, picturing it as all the infinitely complex forces of its history to date indicate that it will be, if these forces are not altered in their future operation by governmental actions of unprecedented magnitude. In this book there is clearly presented the information that can enable the metropolitan dwellers themselves to communicate more effectively with the experts whose business is objective evaluation of urban problems. Once that communication is established, Mr. Vernon says, "We shall have moved a giant step closer to the objective of a more tolerable metropolitan environment."