U.S. Commerce and Industry in the Global Economy

Abstract

The history of the U.S. commerce and industry systems and those of the other three industrial economies described in these volumes has moved beyond the time when their organizational managers only had to worry about competition from other companies in their own countries. Today they must often vie with competitors scattered among the old industrialized countries and powerful new international competitors like the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Korea). Business in the twenty-first century has reached and passed the halfway point in its first quarter. Already the commercial and industrial firms of the last half of the twentieth century have been transformed to the degree that their like 70 years ago would have difficulty recognizing them. Four sweeping changes have altered commerce and industry forever.