Market and the State: Government Policy Towards Business in Europe, Japan, and the USA

The three instruments employed by major industrialized countries for intervening into the market are typically some variant of antitrust or competition policy, direct regulation, and international trade policy, direct regulation, and international trade policy. But the approach and form vary considerably among the developed nations. The purpose of this book is to compare government policies towards business in Europe, Japan and the Us, to analyze their impact and effectivenes, and assess the policies and the specific circumstances under which government intervention is most successful.

The first section of the book compares the antitrust approach in the Us, competition policy in Europe, and fair tarde in Japan. The second section considers the regulation and deregulation movements in the US, public control of business in Europe and industrial targeting in Japan. Finally the interaction between foreign trade policy and domestic business performance is examined in the third section, which considers the rise of protectionism in the US, the Community experiment in Europe and export policies in Japan.

David Audretsch concludes that industrial policies have played a predominant role in shaping the industrial structures of each of these major economic regions in the post-war period. While each country has developed its own particular distinctive mix of industrial policies, market intervention by governments in all of these countries has been at least partially responsible for the patterns of industrial performance that emerged in the 1980s.