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The Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) was established to serve the United States Congress. In return, Congress contributed uniquely to the technology assessment process as it was implemented by OTA. It will be enormously challenging to establish the conditions provided by congressional stewardship that enabled OTA's uneasy but effective marriage of expert advice and democratic participation. These congressional contributions are analyzed and their implications for several alternative approaches to technology assessment institutions are examined.

Mass production has contributed to American prosperity and made available a host of inexpensive products for consumers, industry, and government. Today, however, new paradigms of production are causing revolutionary changes in how managers, engineers, and workers think about making things. This paper describes the main features of “old-era” and “new-era” industrialization and shows how key public policies designed with the old paradigms in mind need to be changed in view of the new.

This article defines competitiveness and discusses why the concept is important to the American economy and to American political discourse. The article also examines three broad issue areas in which there is a direct relationship between Federal information policies and the competitiveness of the American industrial economy. These areas are: (1) serving the private-sector demand for technical information, (2) making Federal information resources available to industry, and (3) restricting foreign access to Federal information resources. In each case, the article sketches the current situation in Federal policy and highlights some of the policy issues that may need resolution.

The chemical industry throughout the world is in a period of rapid change and major reorientation. This calls for a re-examination of the strategies followed by the newly industrializing countries in developing their chemical process industries. Chemical products are essential for almost every aspect of a developing economy. Chemicals and chemical products are used in most sectors of manufacturing, in food processing, in civil construction, in communications, in military operations, in health care, and so on. Pesticides, fertilizers, drugs, paints and coatings, adhesives, plastics, rubber products, hydraulic fluids, etc., are all products of the chemical industry. Like steel and cement, chemicals are everywhere. Thus, a secure supply of chemicals is important to development. While the ten-fold increase in world crude oil prices of the past eight years has been a challenge to the petrochemical industries of Europe, Japan, and to a lesser extent, the United States, it has severely affected the nascent chemical industries in developing countries. The world price of crude n a p h t h a u p o n which many new industries are b a s e d h a s increased manyfold from 1973 to 1982. Thus, these industries, which contribute little to direct employment in developing countries, have also become major consumers of foreign exchange.

This paper asks how have, might, or should national technology strategies change as nations enter into regimes of freer trade. It begins with a discussion of the role of technological advance in affecting the quantity and patterns of trade among nations. Then, the general character of national technology strategies is outlined, and the impact of more open trade on their effectiveness is analyzed. After an overview of events in the United States that indicate the place of technological considerations in current US trade policy and administration, the paper considers how the US-Canadian Free-Trade Agreement might affect R&D, technology development, and technology strategy in the two countries. This paper, which is largely in the nature of a speculation, identifies the opportunity to study changing technological performance as the FTA is implemented.