Imports and Domestic Production of Selected Manufactured Products

The preceding two chapters analyzed per capita imports of manufactured goods by the 23 states without reference to domestic production. While the results clearly indicated the extent of relative openness in many areas, both for manufactures in general and for products important to the developing world, the analyses ignored the size of the potential import competing sector in these countries. Given the tenets of comparative advantage, such concerns would not be especially important for overall per capita imports of manufactured products, since, as noted earlier, every industrialized country would have advantages for some products and disadvantages for others, and mutually beneficial trade could occur as a result. By definition, industrialized states would import some industrial products from each others. For specific product categories, however, nations would have potentially different needs and import levels. Countries with sizable sectors producing particular goods could either have protected against imports or engaged in intra-industry specialization. Both of these approaches could be associated with local employment in the sector but differential openness to imports. In other cases, some countries might have lacked a domestic sector in a particular product area of manufacturing and thus would have been open to imports in this particular area. Yet other countries might have lacked a domestic industrial sector and had low import levels as well due to a lack of local demand for the products in question. In this chapter, therefore, imports in five product areas will be analyzed to determine influences on per capita import patterns among the industrialized countries.