ABSTRACT
The term industrial restructuring does not have a well-defined meaning. It only came into frequent use from the second half of the 1970s onwards. By that time, policy-makers and staff of many national governments and international organisations (cf. UNIDO, 1979) acknowledged that what was first seen as a regular worldwide recession in fact contained major structural elements. In the early 1980s, the OECD launched the concept of ‘positive adjustment policies’ (OECD, 1983) to discourage ‘beggar-thy-neigh-bour’ policies, in which state intervention in one country rekindled industrial problems in another one.
