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An American MITI?
| Article
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20579 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1992 |
2,411 Words |
| Author
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Claude Barfield
Claude Barfield is Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute. |
Some ideas, like bad pennies, keep turning up.
Over the past decade, as the United States struggled to cope with the challenges of heightened international competition and the globalization of markets, pressure to "do something" has spawned a number of calls for new government policies and actions. But as is often the case when Washington is faced with a complex and difficult problem--namely, U.S. competitiveness--the first answer, highly satisfactory to both the politicians and bureaucrats, is to create a new government agency.
As the histories of the Department of Energy and Education prove, new organizations often merely cover the failure and even bankruptcy of substantive policy. But such agencies do provide jobs for bureaucrats and a focus for congressmen who beat their breasts in lamentation over the deplorable state of the U.S. economy or society.
It is against this history and background that one must view and analyze the calls for the creation of a U.S. equivalent to Japan's Minister of International Trade and Industry (MITI) to foster and protest "strategic" technologies and industries that supposedly are indispensable to future U.S. competitiveness.
The Japanese Miti
In assessing the role of MITI in the rise of Japan's industrial strength, a historical perspective helps. The war physically destroyed much of Japan's infrastructure and manufacturing capacity. Thus, for the first two decades after 1948--roughly until the mid-1960--the Japanese government, with MITI in the vanguard, played a crucial role in that nation's economic revival, intervening through broad-scale policies to induce high savings, investment, and industrial cooperation, as well as micropolicies aimed at fostering and protecting basic and advanced sectors.
As Japanese firms became more powerful and moved out into world markets, MITI's role changed greatly, becoming much more that of a convener and forum for consensus building and less a force dictating the rise--and fall--of sectors and companies. By the 1980s, MITI bureaucrats retained very little of the power they had exercised in earlier decades. The exception to this rule--and it was a countertrend that became more significant as the decade unfolded--was in those circumstances when Japan's trading partners, particularly the United States and the European Community, forced Japan to agree to "voluntary" export
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