Volume 31, Number 14 · September 27, 1984
Losing the Economic Race
By Lester C. Thurow
Can America Compete?
by Robert Z. Lawrence
The Brookings Institution, 156 pp., $8.95 (paper)
The DRI Report on US Manufacturing Industries
by Otto Eckstein, by Christopher Caton, by Roger Brinner, by Peter Duprey
McGraw-Hill, 196 pp., $24.95
Americans have reason to worry about their competitiveness on world markets. The deficit in America's balance of trade is running at an annual rate in excess of $120 billion. This represents the loss of three million American jobs, jobs that would exist if exports matched imports. To finance such a deficit America must borrow abroad, and at current rates America will, by mid-1985, become a debtor nation, having borrowed more from foreign countries than it has lent, for the first time since World War I. As with Mexico and Brazil, interest payments on foreign debts are eating up more and more of the resources that could otherwise be used by Americans.
Review, 3919 words
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