Macroeconomic configurations and national policies in the crisis

The crisis underwent by the economies since the 2008 fall is first and foremost the crisis of an economic regime. Each national and regional automobile industry was structured to different degree by this regime. Therefore, the economic questions raised today at the macroeconomic level deserve to be taken into account in order to grasp how the automobile industries behave within the crisis and how they might be able to recover. More precisely, the research of a way out of the crisis has led policy makers to seek meausures to support their automobile industries. Such measures have been implemented in multiple forms and, in some cases, involving massive state investment throughout Europe, in the U.S., Brazil, South Korea and Japan. The question is whether these measures are leading to sustainable configurations both for the industries and the national economies concerned. The economic, environmental, social and political issues that were already raised before the crisis by the greening of the automobile will also have to be recast within these new scenarios. By presenting the diversity of the steps taken, the coherence with which they were developed and implemented and the continuity or disparity within the on-going framework of industry-state relationships, we hope to initiate a series of comparative studies. The measures adopted have often generated heated debate among different stakeholders, highlighting the challenges of “political sustainability” that face regulators as they seek to conciliate environmental perfomance on the one hand and national economic performance on the other. Detailed studies will generate much-needed insight into the variety of alternatives that have emerged.