U.S. Plans To Monitor Auto Sales Steps Will Assess Japanese Compliance With Car Deal

The Clinton administration put forward a detailed program Wednesday aimed at closely tracking whether a trade agreement with Japan is increasing sales of Americanmade cars and auto parts.

U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor said the administration would use his office and four Cabinet departments to assemble sales figures from a number of sources.

He said these figures would be used to produce a report every six months tracking Japanese compliance with the deal.

But Japanese officials immediately criticized the proposal as a unilateral attempt on the part of the United States to impose numerical sales targets that are not contained in the agreement, reached in last-minute bargaining on June 28.

The administration is seeking to narrow America’s $66 billion annual trade deficit with Japan, more than half of it in the automotive sector.

American critics attacked the agreement because it lacks specific numerical sales targets for U.S. autos and auto parts, something the Japanese blasted as “managed trade” and refused to accept.

Without specific targets, the monitoring program is unlikely to produce any significant sales gains and will be subject to continued bickering between the two countries, Republican critics said.

Even though the agreement itself does not have specific targets, the administration said when the program was announced that it would use its own projections of sales increases based on business plans announced at the same time by the five Japanese automakers.

Kantor, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and Laura D’Andrea Tyson, head of the president’s National Economic Council, stressed that the administration planned to be aggressive in pushing for the hoped-for sales increases.

“This administration has made it clear that proper, effective implementation of this important agreement will be one of its highest trade priorities,” Brown said.