Your Money or Your Life!

GLOBALISATION AND EXCLUSION/43

from the three Triad centres are increasingly marginalised.
Multinationals determine where to make productive investments in
relation to the Triad's zones of influence: in Mexico rather than in
Ecuador or Costa Rica; in the Czech Republic or Hungary rather than
in Russia or Romania; in Turkey or Tunisia rather than in sub-
Saharan Africa; in Taiwan or China rather than in Pakistan. In
general, wage costs are not the overriding criteria. Proximity and
access to the targeted Triad market are far and away the key factors
in most cases. A country that can offer two or three - among
proximity, access and low wages - will be accorded priority status. In
1993, 68 per cent of Japanese investments in the Third World went
to East Asia and the Pacific region (40 per cent to China). Predilection
for these regions can be as much a curse as a blessing, leading as it
can to increased dependence. Mexico, for example, gets most of its FDI
from US companies, largely in the form of assembly plants for which
90 per cent of inputs are of US origin (Toussaint, 1994).
A country like Brazil continues to take in large sums of foreign
investment, but they go almost exclusively into the Sao
Paolo-Rio-Belo Horizonte triangle. This region has a population of
40 million, some of whom earn enough to provide a potential outlet
for non-perishable consumer goods (Salama and Valier, 1994). The
remaining population here and elsewhere in Brazil is of little interest
to foreign investors.

Global Commerce Dominated by the Industrialised
Countries

Table 3.4 The share in global exports of the three main blocs of
developing countries between 1950 and 1990

Latin America
Asia
Africa

1950

%

12.4

13.1

5.2

1980

%

5.5

17.8

4.7

1990

%

3.9

14.0

1.9

Source: Overbeek, 1994 (fromWent, 1996, p. 42).