Economics

Permanent URI for this collection

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1

The Globalization of the U.S. Textile and Apparel Industry
(2010) Singh, Simran; Jilani, Saleha
This thesis looks at the expiration of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement and the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing in the context of restrictive trade policies and preferential trade agreements and its implications on the U.S. textile and apparel industry. In this thesis, I documented the political and economic history of the U.S. textile and apparel industry, illustrated consumer responses to the effects global trade policies within the industry and determined six indicators of industry structural and organization change: employment, imports, exports, number of firms and establishments, capital investment and value-added GDP and gross output. By looking at trends in the data, I was able to understand where global trade policies had an influence on the transformation of the textile and apparel industry in the United States. The emphasis of this thesis was to look at the timing of the implementation and expiration of the MFA and the ATC (the NAFTA and the CBI to a smaller extent) and see how they coincide with the changes in the data. In essence, the MFA and the ATC fit chronologically in a series of trade policies since 1974 and in some cases, spurred the global restructuring of the industry, while having critical implications for the domestic textile and apparel industry in the United States.