Adaptation to Change in the U.S. Machine Tool Industry and the Effects ofGovernment Policy

摘要

Machine tool production in the United States has always been highly volatile; itsuffers from a double dose of the accelerator principle affecting investment goods, since machine tools themselves are a major input in the production of other investment goods. Although the average before-tax return of machine tool companies has been about equal to the return for all manufacturing, the standard deviation of annual returns is more than four times greater. The wide cyclical movements have obscured long-term trends in domestic machine tool demand, which is experiencing secular decline; machine tools have fallen from 15-20 percent of the value of total equipment investment in the 1960s to 10-15 percent in the 1980s. This decline has resulted from several sources: substitution of nonmetallic materials for metals, the development of alternative metal-cutting technologies, the declining output of products that had been heavy users of machined parts, and increased productivity of machine tools themselves, which reduces their required numbers.