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460 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 9 (1982)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0460 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE Few would question that the boom of world output and trade that began in the 1950s and built its momentum through the 1960s was, in large measure, the result of these American-led efforts to reduce restrictions on international trade and capital movements and to reestablish a basically liberal, market-oriented international economy. With the growth of the world economy has come a diminution of the relative size of the U.S. economy. We supplied one-third of world exports in 1947, less than 10 percent this year. And while we have become a smaller part of the whole, our economic ties with the rest of the world have become stronger. The proportion of our output and consumption which enters into international trade is twice as high now as it was 75 years ago. The U.S. dollar intermediates not only transactions within the U.S. economy, but a significant share of the trade and financial transactions that take place among non-Americans. We are more involved in the international economy and therefore more often influenced by foreign or international factors. The stronger links with and larger bulk of the rest of the world mean that the impact of these cross-national factors will be larger. As is the intellectual tradition in this era, the articles in this volume focus primarily on the stresses and frictions that have come with expanding interactions across national borders. To use a favored term of economists, these stresses and frictions may be only marginal to the system, but in an open society policy attention tends to focus at the margin-not on the management or control of everything that occurs within the system, but on adjustments which, though they may influence the direction or the speed at which the system moves, are made at the edges. All the contributors to this volume share the view that the benefits from our international interactions far exceed the costs. Hence the practical issue at hand is how to analyze and deal with the many conflicts that are generated while at the same time maintaining an open international trading and payments system. While we shall make no attempt in this introduction to summarize the individual articles in this volume, we note that there are two major themes that run through many of them. One is the crucial importance of integrat- ing economic and political analysis if one is to properly understand the pressures resulting from the internationalization of the world economy and formulate practical proposals for dealing with them. The second is that while there has been a tendency in the past to under- state the importance of international factors in influencing the domestic political economy, we should be careful not to overexaggerate the force of such factors today. The sound of the words interdependence andinterna- tionalization suggests a need for international approaches to problem solv- ing. This may not always be the case. Particularly in the industry studies presented in this volume, the effect of internationalization has been to bring forward a flaw in the domestic economy that did not become critical until it was subject to the stresses of competition. That this rising competition has an international dimension does not mean that the flaws it puts under stress are flaws in the international system. 9

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