
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, June 29, 1990                   TAG: 9006290097
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: A7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Cox News Service
DATELINE: ATLANTA                                LENGTH: Short

EUROPE'S UNITY SEEN AS END TO U.S. WEALTH

Unification of the European Common Market will expose grave shortcomings in the U.S. work force, a leading economist has warned.

Lester Thurow, dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology business school, said the pivotal event of the 20th century will occur Dec. 31, 1992, when the Common Market replaces the United States as the world's largest consumer body.

That will be the next step in the evolution of global companies and a world marketplace, Thurow said, and it will mark the demise of three of the four ways countries traditionally have become rich and powerful.

The United States has "become wealthy because of more natural resources and more capital, better technology and a better work force," Thurow told the Society for Human Resource Management on Wednesday.

"Natural resources will drop out - Japan can run the best steel industry in the world with no natural resources at all," he said.

Capital-intensive industries won't necessarily be in rich countries, and technological advantage is fleeting, Thurow said. What's left to make the difference between economic wealth and want, he said, is the work force. And the United States's is in sad shape.

The dominant industries - biotechnology, telecommunications, computers - will demand human skills far above anything in the past, Thurow declared.

"These are brainpower industries that can be any place on the globe," he said, yet "it takes twice as long to train an American work force than a German one, because the U.S. doesn't have the basic [educational] skills."

by CNB