JUST-IN-TIME INVENTORY CONTROL AND THE ECONOMIC-INTEGRATION OF JAPANESE-OWNED MANUFACTURING PLANTS WITH THE COUNTY, STATE AND NATIONAL ECONOMIES OF THE UNITED-STATES

This paper attempts to shed light on the ongoing debate concerning the spatial implications of just-in-time a (JIT) manufacturing systems. The central issue around which this debate has focused concerns the extent to which use of JIT inventory control encourages the spatial clustering of the members of a JIT network. This paper tests the hypothesis that plants which use JIT inventory control purchase a greater proportion of their material inputs from inside their host economy than plants which do not use JIT inventory control. Using survey data collected from 239 US-based Japanese-owned manufacturing plants, this hypothesis is tested for host economies defined at three geographic scales-county, state and national. Support for the hypothesis is found at the county, but not at the state and national scales. This suggests that use of JIT inventory control encourages the development of extremely localized, backward material input linkages and thus provides support for the argument that JIT encourages the spatial clustering of the members of a JIT network.