U.S. Unveils Plan to Monitor Japan on Autos : Trade: The program aims to address skepticism about whether the recent agreement can be enforced.

The White House on Wednesday took steps to answer skepticism about the recent agreement to give U.S. companies greater access to the Japanese auto market, unveiling a special program to monitor compliance with the pact.

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

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

The U.S. goal is to increase sales opportunities in Japan for the makers of U.S. automobiles and auto parts and to increase production in the United States by Japanese companies.

But the agreement is less a set of measurable steps than a statement of goals and intentions that the Japanese government and auto industry say will guide their conduct in coming years.

For example, these include the elimination of certain government regulations limiting foreign companies’ sales in Japan, and the encouragement of Japanese companies to expand supplier networks to include foreign companies.

Thus the agreement has left some trade experts, academics and industry executives wondering whether progress can be measured and whether the difficulty in quantifying the goals will work against U.S. exporters.

It is against this background that Kantor and Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown announced plans for the government monitoring team. A senior trade official made it clear that the White House is trying to undercut questions about whether the pact is enforceable.

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

But conservative Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan accused the Administration of staging Wednesday’s elaborate news conference to cover up deficiencies in the actual trade agreement.

“This is political damage control, but it doesn’t change the fact that there is nothing in the agreement,” Buchanan said. “Kantor was taken to the cleaners by [Japanese Trade Minister Ryutaro] Hashimoto.”

As portrayed by the White House, the agreement is a series of business plans from which the Administration has projected that Japan’s assembly of automobiles at U.S. plants will reach 2.6 million vehicles a year by 1998, an increase of half a million vehicles from current levels, and that the value of U.S.-made parts going into those vehicles will grow by $6.7 billion to nearly $24 billion over three years.

Kantor and auto industry officials have said the goal is to increase by 200 the number of Japanese dealerships selling U.S. vehicles by the end of the year and by 1,000 by the end of the decade.

Asked what the Administration would do if Japan does not live up to what the agreement’s critics have argued are its vague terms, another senior trade official said that the Administration will “resort to U.S. trade laws.”

The agreement was worked out in Geneva on June 28 under the threat of 100% import taxes that would have been imposed on sales of Japanese luxury vehicles in the United States. Auto industry executives called it a big help, but not a cure-all.

“It mitigates the problem and creates opportunities,” said Andrew H. Card Jr., president of the American Automobile Manufacturers Assn. “All of us could have written a better agreement. Could we have negotiated a better agreement? Probably not.”

Times wire services contributed to this report.