Some Possible Implications of East-West Enterprise-to-Enterprise Agreements

Abstract

The Pythagorean cosmos was threefold, as is, from a speculative point of view, the contemporary world economy — East, West and South pursuing sometimes parallel, frequently divergent, paths of development. The most powerful integrative force, whether of systems of ideas or of institutions, tends to be the advance of compatible knowledge. In contemporary international economic relations the compatibility of scientific and technical progress in the Eastern and Western systems is leading to the multiplication of new forms of productive and trading links These new forms — which go under the name of ‘scientific, technological and industrial co-operation’ — owe their origin to the fact that modern techniques of industrial production have tended to impose similar patterns of industrial organisation on enterprises within each set of countries. In the Western developed economies, the tendency has been for big enterprises to grow still bigger by means of mergers, fusions, etc., so that the share of total manufacturing output provided by, say, the hundred largest enterprises has roughly doubled in recent years. The striking growth of the multinational companies has been due to the internationalisation of this process, as enterprises have sought to protect themselves from the competitive pressures, and to seize the competitive opportunities, generated by the creation of larger, sometimes regionally integrated, markets.