ABSTRACT

At a congressional hearing about the dragging US–Japan trade negotiations, Jeffrey Garten, US commerce undersecretary of the Clinton administration, once cried out: ‘We do not seem to have even a common understanding of the problem, let alone consensus on the solutions’ (FT, 4 February 1994). Garten's frustration is only too understandable. Many US core firms still aspire to micro-Fordism and an international division of labour. The US government's basic belief in free trade may at times appear halfhearted but still represents a programme for the world based on the interests and aspirations of leading US core firms. Many large Japanese exporters, on the other hand, aim for Toyotism and for vertical de-integration. Unlike their US counterparts, Toyotist core firms do not aim to exploit free trade but to circumvent or even exploit foreign trade barriers. Such diverging strategic outlooks effectively do hamper a common understanding of the US–Japanese trade ‘problem’.