Autumn 1994 Article excerpts.
Competitiveness is a term that, for many, captures the challenges facing the U.S. economy.
Yet ever since it first surfaced in the early 1980s, it has been repeatedly dismissed as wrongheaded or irrelevant and disparaged as an unwarranted critique of U.S. industry and economic policy. Early critics felt that it was wrong, even slightly unpatriotic, to entertain serious thoughts about systemic challenges to the industrial prowess of the United States. Furthermore, because competitiveness implied that government and industry should seek to work more closely together to strengthen U.S. economic performance, some equated it with a heavy-handed industrial policy that would have the government pick winners and losers in the economy. Despite these criticisms, competitiveness entered the mainstream of the U.S. economic policy debate. So much so that by the late 1980s, it was dismissed again, this time as just another Washington buzzword that would quickly go out of fashion.