From competition to collaboration: the challenge of commercial-class aircraft manufacturing

Abstract

Sectoral analyses reveal an emerging tension between a global market and an anarchic political system and oblige scholars to examine the dynamic and reciprocal relationship between states and markets. This analysis of commercial-class aircraft manufacturing, a strategic industry, demonstrates how corporate behavior affects political choices and vice versa. It suggests that corporate and political policymaking is a messy process: first, policymakers must respond to multiple and often conflicting demands, from both domestic and international constituencies; second, they are influenced by a number of variables, including ideology, interest group activity, consequences of previous policies, perceptions about their state's position in the international system, and available knowledge about how to realize specific goals. Sets of competing variables which act as centripetal and centrifugal forces are identified and analyzed in terms of how they have impelled corporations to seek transnational production arrangements. Three prototypical structures of international production are delineated, and the potential consequences for states and corporations participating in each model are discussed. The key objectives of the article are to encourage the use of multivariate analyses to explain change in the international system and to provoke further debate about the appropriate policies to pursue to achieve global economic competitiveness across a number of industry sectors.