In the Hurricane's Eye: The Troubled Prospects of Multinational Enterprises

By Raymond Vernon

Book Overview

The world's multinational enterprises face a spell of rough weather, political economist Ray Vernon argues, not only from the host countries in which they have established their subsidiaries, but also from their home countries. Such enterprises - a few thousand in number, including Microsoft, Toyota, IBM, Siemens, Samsung, and others - now generate about half of the world's foreign trade. So any change in the relatively benign climate in which they have operated during the 1990s will create serious tensions in international economic relations.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674445821
• ISBN13: 9780674445826
• Release Date: November 1998
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 262 Pages
• Weight: 1.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.6" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

The troubled prospects of multinational enterprises

The book's subtitle reveals the author's position. Thirty years ago, Raymond Vernon was one of the first economists to document the increasing importance of globalization and of the multinational corporations that benefited most directly from the trend. In this, his last book before his recent death, he revisits the subject, and finds cause for growing concern about the future of the multinationals, despite the fact that they have grown tremendously in terms of size and power. Once their expansion was viewed with suspicion and hostility by many of their new host countries, but now multinationals are actively wooed throughout most of the world for their job-creating investments in local economies. However, within their own home countries (predominantly the advanced economies of the U.S., Europe, and Japan), the multinationals are increasingly a source of political tension. There is a fundamental conflict between the desire of the state to maximize the well-being of its own people and the desire of a multinational to optimize its global system regardless of the impact that might have within any individual country, including its own home country. The combination of global competition and aging populations has increased the demand for government sponsored social support in the most advanced economies, even as the same pressures encourage multinationals to move investments and jobs out of their high-cost home countries. Although globalization is not likely to be reversed, the multinationals may increasingly find themselves used as convenient scapegoats for the problems caused by this massive restructuring of the global economy. The recent WTO riots in Seattle may only be the beginning.