Buy American Research Articles

Discrimination in Government Procurement of Foreign Goods in the U. S. and Western Europe

This study seeks to identify and measure the extent of discrimination against foreign goods that is indicated by the purchasing practices of governments of a number of industrial nations. The Buy American policy has received considerable attention internationally as an overt act of discrimination on the part of U.S. government against foreign goods. Yet it should be recognized at the outset that the U.S. policy is unique only because it is explicitly set in the law. The U.S. government's Buy American policy and similar practices by other governments involve a systematic attempt to discriminate against foreign suppliers and in favor of domestic producers of simiar goods.1 The Buy American act directs government agencies to purchase goods for use in the U.S. from domestic suppliers except when a) the items are unavailable in the U.S. in sufficient quantity and/or quality, or b) the offered price of the domestic goods exceeds the delivered foreign price of the same goods by more than 6 percent (12 percent if the domestic items are supplied by small enterprises or are produced in areas where substantial unemployment prevails). In July 1962, the Department of Defense, acting on the basis of the deterioration in the U.S.

"Buy American" as an Instrument of Policy

"Buy American" as an Instrument of Policy

Gatt, the California Buy American Act, and the Continuing Struggle between Free Trade and Protectionism

Gatt, the California Buy American Act, and the Continuing Struggle between Free Trade and Protectionism

Gatt, the California Buy American Act, and the Continuing Struggle between Free Trade and Protectionism

Gatt, the California Buy American Act, and the Continuing Struggle between Free Trade and Protectionism

The Buy American Act: A Review and Assessment

The Buy American Act: A Review and Assessment

When Can California Join the Union?

Americans take pride in having one of the most socially and technically mobile societies in the world. We admire the long haul and the bulk cargo handler, the interstate expressway and centralized train control. We take pride in Big and Little Inches and other long distance pipelines, and in supertankers. Everywhere about us we note with approval the physical evidence of the linkage of major markets and distant sources of supply. We do not argue the establishment of a Common Market or an Inner Thirteen or Outer Seven or Thirty-Seven. We long ago chose the Common Market and wrote it into our Constitution, thereby choosing in favor of economies of area specialization and of large-scale production and con sumption. Occasionally we may urge ourselves to Buy American, but never to Buy Nevadan. We consider it perfectly normal to be awakened by a Connecticut alarm clock; to eat a breakfast gathered from Florida, Iowa, and Kansas; and so forth. In the face of this geographic and economic sophistication, it is indeed curious that in dealing with water and hydropower resources, we revert to a medieval sectionalism of amazing tenacity. Rather than link supply with existing markets in the conventional economically rational manner, we expect new markets to arise close to the supply, and indeed develop our physical potentials only as we forecast a demand within the confines of our medieval duchy. No example of this sectionalism is more outlandish than the state of Maine's prohibition on exporting Maine hydropower outside the state. But we need not go to the far corner of the United States for outlandish examples of resource sectionalism. Nowhere is it more extreme than here in the Far West, where not cost but legal sanctions and anthropological rituals combine to keep water and hydropower from the places that need them. The last assistant secretary of the Department of the Interior to suggest that water go to California instead of the ocean was sent to Afghanistan to do penance. Lately he has been allowed to return, but only to California. The United States Supreme Court's Special Master of the Colorado River has been engaged for some years now in what seems to many people to be an effort to distribute a water shortage in the most economically inefficient way that is legally permissible. In recent years we have been treated to the spectacle of our usually sensible Canadian cousins seeking not just to ignore North America's greatest hydro-power stream, the Columbia, but actually to make the great river less great by turning it into the Fraser. In their favor we must admit they didn't try to argue that the proposal was sensible; they merely contended it was legal because the word parties

Planning Sales Campaigns in Forty-Eight Sovereignties

PROBABLY most of you think that you have a pretty good understanding of the nation's geography. If the 48 states were hacked out into jig-saw pieces, you could put the puzzle together again in quick order. You think you could-but, as a matter of fact the geography has changed a great deal since you went to school. We don't have 48 states anymore-we have 48 separate kingdoms. I didn't come here to give you a lecture on geography, and so I haven't a complete December, I939, model map to show you. However, I do have a segment of the map and here it is. It used to be, you know, that it was pretty hard to tell when you stepped from one state into another, but you don't have that difficulty today, for each little state or kingdom has raised a high wall. They have guns for defensive purposes -guns in the form of multitudinous tax, inspection, standardizing and grading laws-designed to protect home industry. It's strange that they waited until the Thirties to figure out this form of protection, for the idea is modelled after the Republican Party's Protective Tariff System, Buy American. Buy Bingo State Products. Buy Bilgeville. This big-scale map doesn't show you all of the interesting details. For example-here (pointing) is a gate, and if you are in one principality you may look through the gate into the adjoining kingdom where you see luscious green grass and belching factory smoke chimneys-a perfect picture of sales potentialities. You decide that you would like to do business in such a rich kingdom, and, trustingly, you start through the gate, but immediately you are pounced upon by uniformed guards and embarrassed eve more than the young farmer whose plight was recently described by Governor Sta k of Missouri.

Younger Painters in the East

“Art is upon the land,” said Whistler once, “to be chucked under the chin by every passing gallant.” Art is indeed upon the land, to be flirted with by a new race of collectors educated to Buy American, to be clasped unto their broad bosom by the editors of the shiny paper magazines catering to the more literate masses, and finally, despite or because of all this unprecedented affection, to get it in the neck. For American art (and it is that only of which we speak at the moment) is in truth something very different from the conception of the fashionable collectors and those purveyors of sugar-coated culture, the magazine editors (though the editors would be the last themselves to presume to any such noble aspiration; the more honest among them will tell you right off that they reproduce paintings for the same reason they do photographs of pretty girls: to gratify a fundamental and imperative urge of their readers—in this instance, to look at pictures). American art to these people consists of the work of about a dozen well known figures, among them Speicher, Brook, Marsh, Benton, Wood, Curry, du Bois, and, for the more advanced among them Marin, Kuhn, O'Keeffe and Kuniyoshi.

Younger Painters in the East

“Art is upon the land,” said Whistler once, “to be chucked under the chin by every passing gallant.” Art is indeed upon the land, to be flirted with by a new race of collectors educated to Buy American, to be clasped unto their broad bosom by the editors of the shiny paper magazines catering to the more literate masses, and finally, despite or because of all this unprecedented affection, to get it in the neck. For American art (and it is that only of which we speak at the moment) is in truth something very different from the conception of the fashionable collectors and those purveyors of sugar-coated culture, the magazine editors (though the editors would be the last themselves to presume to any such noble aspiration; the more honest among them will tell you right off that they reproduce paintings for the same reason they do photographs of pretty girls: to gratify a fundamental and imperative urge of their readers—in this instance, to look at pictures). American art to these people consists of the work of...