Multinational Corporations, Nation States, World Economy

Abstract

A few hundred giant corporations now straddle the world, exerting a pervasive influence over its destiny. They control between a quarter and a third of all production, and a larger percentage of its trade. They sustain their predominant and expanding economic position through privileged access to technology, finance and marketing facilities, and also exert a powerful influence over the activities of smaller local firms which rely on them as suppliers, buyers, creditors and providers of high technology. Because they create employment and can usually afford to pay above-average wages, they can also often secure the support of trade unions and working-class political movements for their activities.

We thus see that the growth of the world economic process, having as its basis the growth of productive forces, not only calls forth an intensification of production relations among various countries, not only widens and deepens general capitalist interrelations, but also calls to life new economic formations, new economic forms unknown to past epochs in the history of capitalist development.

Nikolai Bukharin,Imperialismand WorldEconomy, 1918

What is at issue is whether — in an era of international transfer pricing — government control of the private economy based on national price systems is any longer adequate.

Robin Murray, Multinationals Beyond the Market, 1981