Americans in Paris . . . [European Community]

Steps being taken by US companies to prepare for the post-1992 European market are described. In some cases, US companies may be better organized than their European counterparts to deal with a unified market. However, US trade officials still fear possible trade barriers. In particular, Article 115 of the 1957 European Economic Treaty has been used to protect the domestic automobile industries. The single market that is supposed to emerge in 1992 will do away with Article 115, but some European Community (EC) members have simply proposed enacting similar trade rules on an EC-wide basis, rather than a national one. What has provoked the ire of some US high-technology companies is a 1989 change in EC rules of origin that allows a product to be classified as European. To get the made-in-Europe seal, semiconductor chips must be fabricated in EC territory, whereas previously they only had to be assembled into packages and tested in Europe. Some of the largest US electrotechnology companies-AT&T, DEC, and IBM-have joined the European Strategic Programme for Research and Development in Information Technologies (Esprit), and, in January, Philips Consumer Electronics Co., Thomson Consumer Electronics Inc., and NBC formed a high-definition television (HDTV) consortium