ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at three industries such as consumer electronics, advanced electronics and oil refining. In various countries each of these industries occupies the enviable position of being a centrepiece for the government’s industrial aspirations. Consumer electronics, for instance, was one of the priority industries which Japanese policymakers chose to foster in the early post-war period. Consumer electronics defined here to include familiar items like television and radio receivers, phonographs, stereo and sound equipment, tape recorders, electronic calculators, several major components such as picture tubes, and new products like video-tape recorders and video-discs. Beginning around 1965, internal developments in the industry led firms to undertake a feverish search for low-wage locations for the later stages of production. Conditions in the consumer electronics industry have increasingly favoured a strategy of replacing exports by direct investment in the major consumer markets, and this practice is becoming widespread among manufacturers in the major exporting countries.
