Big Steel

Big Steel explores an industry that has been in near continual transformation for a generation or more and captures the shape and structure of these changes. Perhaps even more significantly, it makes the case that developments in the new millennium denote a new phase in the global steel business, which portends even more dramatic changes of behaviour and performance. -- Peter Clancy is a professor of political science at St. Francis Xavier University and the author of Micro-Politics and Canadian Business: Paper, Steel and the Airlines

Big Steel examines trade, competition, and survival in a key industry under globalizing pressures.

Steel is the mainstay of the world’s major industries. Worldsteel production has grown dramatically as countries industrialize andadd their own steel-producing capacity. China’s prodigiousexpansion of steel output increases the industry’s naturalvulnerability to oversupply and volatile prices.

Big Steel explores how the integrated steel industry isadapting to trade and international competition. These arise from theindustry’s diffusion beyond its historical core in North Americaand Europe. To show how this occurred, Big Steel applies PaulKrugman’s Nobel-Prize-winning explanation of industrial locationand trade. The industry’s technology and economic structure, andthe pricing strategies available, produce fateful competition andincentives to consolidate internationally. Examining theindustry’s survival options, including close co-operation withits primary customers, the automakers, this book anticipates acosmopolitan future. It is a straightforward account of a complicatedprocess, and the development of a new phase in the global steelbusiness.