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Is the United States competitive in world markets? HBR here publishes 23 opinions from leaders in Asia, Europe, and the United States--including the U.S. presidential candidates, CEOs and chairmen of large multinational corporations, owners of small businesses, labor leaders, and economists. Their responses reflect the diversity of their backgrounds and viewpoints. But they all agree that the United States has a competitiveness problem. What they do not agree on is the source of that problem and what its solution should be. In this first round of answers to HBR's call to its readership on the competitiveness issue, the respondents are both creative and substantive. In diagnosing the difficulties, they fall into three groups. The first believes the problem to be endemic and far-reaching, touching every corner of society. The United States suffers from its own form of the British disease; without a solution that addresses the complexity of the problem, our standard of living will continually decline. The second group argues that the problem is not so much societal as managerial. Only more attention to manufacturing and investment and the exploitation of international markets will begin to turn the future around. The third group believes the problem is macroeconomic and structural, growing out of the federal budget and U.S. trade deficits, but curable with traditional macroeconomic logic. These respondents alert us to the importance of the issue. What we now need is to start a dialogue that will result in a solution to the problem. INSET: Other Harvard Business Review articles on competitiveness.. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The recent travails of the American economy have created a broad public awareness that the very terms of industrial competition have changed in some fundamental way. From most every position on the political spectrum comes, at last, an acknowledgment that ‘bandaid’ approaches to this or that specific difficulty will not work. What is needed, we are told, is a consistent and coordinated government policy toward the nation's industry—not the crazy-quilt of legislation, regulation, informal understandings, and ad hoc exceptions that now exists. Whatever our ideological preferences, the realities of the international marketplace demand of us a coherent national posture toward industry. We have been too long complacent. Now we must get our house m order. As discussion of an industrial policy for the United States evolves, the form this new order is to take calls ever more loudly for disciplined attention. As is often the case with politically sensitive issues, however, discussion itself commonly becomes a form of special pleading—experts talking past each other in favor of their own chosen remedies for the nation's economic ills. We at HBR thought it a good idea to gather in one room some of the most thoughtful and articulate participants in the industrial policy debate, provide the opportunity for several hours of open-ended conversation, and edit the transcript of that conversation down to article length—all this, of course, as a means of systematically illuminating the questions at hand by shining the light of argument in them from several directions at once. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article stresses the need for an industrial policy for entrepreneurship to attain sustainable economic growth in the U.S. The author promotes the use of government policy to lead into the creation and maintenance of a climate of business activity that can help the cause of entrepreneurship. He further argues that real growth depends on reduction of budget deficits and the cost of capital, and substantial changes in tax policy, government regulation, and trade policy. An industrial policy that supports entrepreneurial activity can help the U.S. reach a more prosperous, productive, and secured future.