Technology competition policies and the semiconductor industries of Japan and the United States: a fifty-year retrospective

The dramatic changes in the fates of firms and industries involved in the production of semiconductors in the United States and Japan over the past half century have led to a large literature addressing or at least posing a number of questions. Did technology import policies, protectionism, support of research consortia, and the use of other industrial policies help or hurt the development of the Japanese industry? What were the consequences of the apparent technological discontinuities represented by the replacement of vacuum tubes by transistors, of germanium transistors by silicon transistors, of discrete transistors by integrated circuits? Have differences in industrial structure between the United States and Japan had consequences for competitiveness? This paper reviews this literature, and applies hindsight in revisiting these questions.