ABSTRACT
Competitiveness is the ability of a country to achieve a sustainable trade balance in goods and services combined while providing an acceptable rate of improvement iii the living standard of its people. From a strictly United States (US) perspective, concern about trade has been intensified by the rapidly rising US current-account deficit during the 1980s. How far and how fast the changes will come is impossible to predict, but it is already clear that they will have major implications for the world economy and for US trade policy. To the extent that national economies are increasingly shaped by market forces, they inevitably become fuller participants in world trade and in the international economic system more generally. Transcending the discrete events are fundamental longer-term trends that will condition the environment for world trade in the 1990s and beyond. One trend is the accelerating globalization of markets not only for goods but for services, capital, and technology as well.
