ABSTRACT
The - empirically and conceptually - well-founded discussion on strategies and approaches suitable to develop internationally competitive industries, a discussion that has gained in depth and breadth especially since the end of the 1980s, differs fundamentally from the positions represented by followers of the neoliberal or neoclassical schools of thought. On the basis of the latter schools of thought, or theoretical edifices, specific - yet similar - economic-policy concepts have, since the end of the 1970s, been devised to safeguard the dynamism and international competitiveness of industrialized and developing countries alike:
At OECD level, the concept of positive adjustment was developed at the end of the 1970s as a guiding principle of economic policy, an approach intended as a basic concept keyed to formulating optimal framework conditions for the process of structural economic adjustment (OECD 1979). The discussion on a structural adjustment policy appropriate for developing countries, which has occupied World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) since the end of the 1970s, displays distinct parallels to the OECD's concept of "positive adjustment". Developing countries, too, are expected by World Bank and IMF to gear their policy-thinking to the concept of competitive economy, i.e. competition at home and free trade abroad, the recipe they claim to have been followed by the especially successful firstand second-generation export-oriented NICs in East and Southeast Asia.
