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Monopolistic Advantages and Foreign Involvement by US Manufacturing Industry

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Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a growing overlap between empirical analyses in three different branches of economics: the determinants of market concentration in industrial economics; the determinants of comparative advantage in trade theory; and the determinants of the growth of multinational corporations (MNCs) in the study of international direct investment.2The factors which have been found to lead to the emergence of oligopolistic structures within the industrialised countries have, to a large extent, been used by ‘ new’ trade theorists to explain the growth of manufactured exports and by MNC analysts to explain the ‘ internationalisation of production’ by manufacturing industry. The factors which, in other words, have been observed to cause the growth of large firms internally also seem to cause them to get more ‘ involved abroad’ by exporting commodities and by setting up production affiliates. The concurrence between these various relationships is not exact, as we shall see later, but it is strong enough to merit more explicit attention than it has received till now.

The author is grateful to Dermot McAleese, Ajit Singh, Raymond Vernon and an anonymous referee of Oxford Economic Papers for comments, and particularly to Robert Bacon for extensive discussions and very helpful suggestions at various stages of preparing this paper.

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© 1980 Sanjaya Lall

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Lall, S. (1980). Monopolistic Advantages and Foreign Involvement by US Manufacturing Industry. In: The Multinational Corporation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05228-8_1

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