Aside from the effect Ford’s restructuring plan likely will have on the national economy, it was unclear Monday what sort of repercussions the car company’s layoffs and plant closings will have for Maine and the rest of New England.

Ford has no production plants in New England. It has facilities in Edison, N.J., and Buffalo, N.Y., and other plants in Ontario besides one that is closing in Windsor, which is directly across the Canadian border from Detroit.

ZF Friedrichshafen AG owns two auto parts manufacturing facilities in Brewer: ZF Lemforder Corp. and Brewer Automotive Components Inc., both of which make chassis components for Ford, General Motors and other automakers. The ZF Lemforder plant has about 300 workers and another 100 work at the BAC facility.

Frank Buscemi, public affairs manager in the Detroit office of the German auto parts company, said Monday that the Brewer facilities most likely will not be affected by Ford’s reduction plans.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “We don’t do a lot of Ford business” in Brewer.

The parts manufactured for Ford in Brewer are for product lines that will not be affected by the plant closings, he said.

“I don’t think you’re going to see anything out of our end,” Buscemi said. “Everything should be good.”

Howard Segal, a history professor at University of Maine, said Monday that Ford has a long history of outsourcing and that the cutbacks likely will be felt economically in New England, even if there are no Ford plants in the region. Segal recently published a book about the company called “Recasting the Machine Age: Henry Ford’s Village Industries.”

“In this respect, trickle-down economics occur and will occur,” Segal said.

The historian said Ford, like the other large Michigan-based American automobile manufacturers, has been struggling for decades to stem the popularity of foreign imports. Chrysler merged with German company Daimler-Benz in 1998 in an effort to become more competitive, and just last November General Motors announced it intends to cut 30,000 jobs and to close nine North American manufacturing facilities by 2008.

“Even in Michigan people aren’t wedded to American cars [anymore],” Segal said. “Competition is fierce.”

For example, none of the three car companies have come up with an environmentally friendly vehicle to rival the popularity of Japanese hybrids, he said. Ford specifically has been burdened with an “enormous” bureaucracy and lately has not had any hot-selling models outside its line of sport utility vehicles, he said.

“I don’t imagine either of these companies – Ford and GM – will go bankrupt, [but] what alternative do they have?” Segal said. “You can’t keep losing and losing and losing millions of dollars.”