Over the past forty years, state/provincial and local governments in the United States and Canada have provided foreign automakers with approximately $4.80 billion in incentives in order to lure light vehicles assembly plants to their areas. This has included tax abatements, infrastructure construction, land giveaways, job training programs, and other subsidies. As of early 2015, ten foreign vehicle makers operated 20 light vehicles in developed North America. Despite the fact that all ten of these automakers have pursued a similar pattern—first exporting vehicles into the United States and Canada before launching vehicle plants in developed North America—each has followed its own specific historical development path and has created its own unique growth trajectory.This book provides a unique historical and qualitative review of these ten vehicle makers, from their early beginnings to their export entry into the United States and/or Canada through early 2015. In addition, it chronicles the histories of more than a dozen former automakers and potential future foreign light motor vehicle assembly plants in the United States and Canada. This includes the first foreign automaker to build its cars in the United States, De Dion-Bouton of France in July 1900, the early 20th Century endeavors of Fiat, Mercedes, and Rolls Royce, and the present day hopes of Chinese and Indian automakers. In the process, the text also provides an assessment of the top competing states and sites for any future plants, the possible incentives packages governments may offer to attract such facilities, and an estimated incentive value for each automaker. Overall, the goal of this book is to expand the knowledge of policymakers at all tiers of government in the United States and Canada and to help them take a more holistic look at the pros and cons of attracting Automobile Manufacturing FDI. It is hoped that this will enable them to make more informed decisions when pursuing a new foreign motor vehicle assembly plant. Its findings should also prove informative to urban and regional planning, political science, sociology, economics, labor, and international development scholars and students in North America and worldwide.

In 2018 almost half of all vehicles made in North America were produced at foreign-owned plants, and the sector was on track to monopolize the market. Despite this, the industry has been overlooked compared with its domestic counterpart, both in scholarship and popular memory. Redressing this neglect, America’s Other Automakers provides a new history of the foreignowned auto sector, the first to extensively draw on archival sources and to articulate the human agency of participants, including workers, managers, and industry recruiters. Timothy J. Minchin challenges the view that the industry’s growth primarily reflected incentives, stressing human agency and the complexity of individual stories instead. Deeply human in its approach, the book also explores the industry’s impact on grassroots communities, showing that it had more costs than supporters acknowledged. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, America’s Other Automakers uncovers significant tensions over unionization, reports of discriminatory hiring, and unease about the industry’s rapid growth, critically exploring seven large assembly facilities and their impact on the communities in which they were built.

This book provides an overview of evolving patterns of trade partnership with historical perspective. It presents changing requirements of industry competitiveness and explains the vital relationships between trade partnerships and industry competitiveness. As well, it further examines the interactive relationships between trade partnerships and industry competitiveness. In recent years, with decreasing strategic alliances among nations and less visibility of international governance mechanisms (e.g., WTO) and counter to globalization, preferential trade agreements and free-trade agreements have proliferated among nations. At the same time, industrial competitiveness is becoming a serious strategic policy priority of nations—both advanced and emerging economies. Theoretical discussion focuses on the practices of global network capabilities for the top of the pyramid (ToP) and base of the pyramid (BoP). Special focus is on trade partnerships and industry competitiveness in the Asian economies (China, Japan, South Korea, India, Indonesia), three ASEAN nations (Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia), and Mexico. Extensive industry and firm-level case studies discuss ToP and BoP interface capabilities in the form of manufacturing and services life-cycle management, which extends value creation and delivery of manufacturing and services. This extension integrates the cloud ecosystem, such as timely data/information/knowledge flows via the virtual world; and ground value chains, such as the flow of complex real goods and services in the visible world.

The auto sector is North America’s most iconic of industries. Since the North American Free Trade Agreement came into existence in 1994, the sector has undergone tremendous change: escalating concerns around climate change, advances in electric and automated vehicles, deindustrialization/reindustrialization, and the rise of low-cost locations as hubs for manufacturing. The North American Auto Industry since NAFTA examines the issues that have preoccupied the development of policy associated with the manufacture of automobiles in North America. The collection addresses the punctuations that have afflicted the industry since NAFTA’s implementation as well as the slower, incremental evolutions that have also occurred. Several aspects of automobility and the industry are explored, including but not limited to the Canadian, American, and Mexican automotive sectors and their evolution and interaction under evolving trade regimes. The book analyses issues surrounding labour, technology, trade policy, regional development, the environment, and broader societal impacts of the automobile. It also draws on the expertise of a wide cross-section of industry experts and scholars to provide readers with a deeper understanding of the automotive industry and its central role in North America’s economic, business, and political landscape.

From the back cover: Canada can compete in international markets, but not, the authors contend, under the present national economic strategy. Policies that redistribute income and allocate resources through government fiat have weakended Canada's ability to transform its manufacturing sector to meet the new competititve challenges. D'Cruz and Fleck compare the performance of seventy-one Canadian industries from 1967 to 1981 with industries in Japan, the United States, Britain and France. To enhance the competitiveness of Canadian manufacturing, the authors propose a differential industrial strategy, one that emphasizes growth and development. Government, they say, must play a "hands-off" role in Canada's market economy, limiting itself to establishing the rules of the game. The authors recommend, in addition, macro-economic policies that would reduce the federal deficit, restrain wages for public servants, preserve low differentials between Canadian and American interest rates, and maintain the Canadian dollar at 70 cents U.S.