Storm Over the Multinationals: Problems and Prospects
Just a few years ago, multinational enterprises were busily and profitably occupied in spreading their subsidiaries across the globe. Today, the world is awash with actions and proposals that would restrain the multinational enterprise and would alter its relations to nation-states.
Raymond Vernon is Director of the Center for International Affairs and Herbert F. Johnson Professor of International Business Management at Harvard. He is the author of Sovereignty at Bay: The Multinational Spread of U.S. Enterprises and other works. This article is adapted from the final chapter of his book, Storm over the Multinationals: The Real Issues, to be published by the Harvard University Press in the late spring of 1977. The key generalizations in this article rest mainly on research that is presented in that book. Copyright(c) 1977 by The President and Fellows of Harvard University.
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Author's Note: The major conclusions of this article will be expanded in "Sovereignty at Bay: The Multinational Spread of U.S. Enterprises," to be published in September 1971 by Basic Books, Inc., New York.
The waves of the business cycle are becoming ripples. The recent American combination of minimal inflation and very low unemployment may not be an aberration, but the beginning of a new worldwide trend. Smarter government policy, globalization, changes in employment, advances in information technology, and emerging markets all cushion shocks and dampen the familiar boom and bust. The consequences for world politics and prosperity will be profound.
It is now generally accepted that the expansion of the multinational corporation is a major, perhaps the major, phenomenon of the international economy today. Large corporations with their headquarters in the United States, in other Western industrialized countries, and now increasingly in Japan as well, are expanding their activities both into industrialized countries, including the Soviet sphere, and into the less-developed world. Once heavily concentrated in mining and extractive fields, today it is the manufacturing activities of the multinationals that command growing attention.
