ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the international trends and changes in the industry which have most affected European and national policies in the 1980s as a prelude to describing the particular forms of policy and initiatives developed in the West Midlands. The main problem in agreeing a European trade policy with Japan is the wide variation in Japanese market penetration of different European countries. Resolving trade imbalances with Japan will ultimately depend less on trade agreements than on equalizing relative competitiveness and it is this which underpins the second main strand of European policy. The success of the vehicle manufacturers located in the UK is of immense importance to employment in other manufacturing industries. Vehicle components were identified as a priority sector for the initial activities of the company. The West Midlands was in the forefront of these moves partly because it was one of the regions and partly because the UK government's non-interventionist stance ignored the differential local and regional effects.
