This volume examines the influences of technology and international trade policies on the troubled U.S. steel industry. Does leadership in technology guarantee competitive advantage in industrial markets? Or do the costs of production and the lack of investment capital offset technological gains for the domestic steel industry? Which international trade policies can help this industry, and which may be harming it? With these and other questions in view, The Competitive Status of the U.S. Steel Industry estimates global trends in steel trade, discusses patterns of production and consumption, and analyzes the possible effects of alternative governmental policies on this critically important industry.

What is the cause of the American steel industry's deplorable situation today? Troubled in many areas—competition from imports, technology implementation, cost and utilization of raw materials, investment policy, philosophy of management, and union attitudes, to name only a few—can the industry survive? These are the questions Dr. Kiers confronts in this book. Unless answers can be found, he warns, the result will be further decline and, finally, bankruptcy or nationalization. Unwilling to accept either possibility, Dr. Kiers challenges the steel industry to achieve a rebirth he sees as feasible only through a hard-nosed, realistic approach, an insistence on innovation, and a willingness to apply discipline to every facet of steel making. Dr. Kiers presents an in-depth analysis of Japan's steel industry, compares it with the U.S. industry, and discusses U.S. technology and import problems with reference to Japan. He then inventories the factors responsible for the current problems and lays the groundwork for a new start, going on to point out that the difficulties faced by the steel industry may be a portent of what will happen to other industries unless they, too, reassess both labor and management attitudes and make radical changes.

Steel and Steelworkers is a fascinating account of the forces that shaped Pittsburgh, big business, and labor through the city's rapid industrialization in the mid-nineteenth century, its lengthy era of industrial "maturity," its precipitous deindustrialization toward the end of the twentieth century, and its reinvention from "hell with the lid off" to America's most livable (post-industrial) city. Hinshaw examined a wide variety of company, union, and government documents, oral histories, and newspapers to reconstruct the steel industry and the efforts of labor, business, and government to refashion it. A compelling report of industrialization and deindustrialization, in which questions of organization, power, and politics prove as important as economics, Steel and Steelworkers shows the ways in which big business and labor helped determine the fate of steel and Pittsburgh.

Drawing upon case studies of the steel industry in the US, Japan, South Korea, Brazil and India, this book explains how and why the steel industry has shifted from advanced capitalist countries to late industrializing countries. Anthony P. D'Costa examines the relationship between industrial change and institutional responses to technological diffu