U.S. industry faced a gloomy outlook in the late 1980s. Then, industrial performance improved dramatically through the 1990s and appears pervasively brighter today. A look at any group of industries, however, reveals important differences in the factors behind the resurgence—in industry structure and strategy, research performance, and location of activities—as well as similarities in the national policy environment, impact of information technology, and other factors.


U.S. Industry in 2000 examines eleven key manufacturing and service industries and explores how they arrived at the present and what they face in the future. It assesses changing practices in research and innovation, technology adoption, and international operations.


Industry analyses shed light on how science and technology are applied in the marketplace, how workers fare as jobs require greater knowledge, and how U.S. firms responded to their chief competitors in Europe and Asia. The book will be important to a wide range of readers with a stake in U.S. industrial performance: corporate executives, investors, labor representatives, faculty and students in business and economics, and public policymakers.

Table of Contents


Front Matter
1 America's Industrial Resurgence (?): An Overview
2 The Dynamics of Long-Term Growth: Gaining and Losing Advantage in the Chemical Industry
3 Chemicals
4 Steel
5 Powder Metallurgy Parts
6 Trucking
7 Grocery Retailing
8 Retail Banking
9 Computing
10 Semiconductors
11 Hard Disk Drives
12 Apparel
13 Pharmaceuticals and Biotechnology
Index