Posted on August 01, 2011 by Le Kieu Hanh

This short article is about the U.S business in recent years. Perhaps the most important economic change toward the end of the 20th century, and certainly the one whose impact was the most difficult to gauge, was what became known as the “globalization” of the economy. We may all know that the great prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s had rested on, among other things, the relative insulation of the United States from the pressures of international competition. As late as 1970, international trade still played a relatively small role in the American economy as a whole, which thrived on the basis of the huge domestic market in North America.

By the end of the 1970s, however, the world had intruded on the American economy in profound ways, and that intrusion increased unabated for the next twenty years. Exports rose from just under 43 billion dollars in 1970 to over 789 billion dollars in 2000. Most American products, in other words, now faced foreign competition inside the United States. America had made 76 percent of the world’s automobiles in 1950 and 48 percent in 1960. By 1990, that share had dropped to 20 percent; in 2000, even after a substantial revival of the automobile industry, the American share had risen only to 21.5 percent.