Explaining the Resurgence of U.S. Competitiveness: The Rise of Wintelism

What explains the resurgence of U.S. international competitiveness in the 1990s? The previous decade can be characterized as one of intense U.S. concern about its declining international competitiveness. In this article, we argue that U.S. industry adopted a new industrial paradigm called "Wintelism" in response to competitive pressures from western Europe and East Asia. The essence of Wintelism is a reliance on open but owned technical standards and extensive outsourcing of component production to enable industrial structures to become less vertically and more horizontally integrated. Countries like the United States that pursued a modified regulatory state approach to structuring state-societal relationships found it easier to adopt this new paradigm than countries that pursued the developmental state approach.

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