144 Historical Perspectives
a beneficial impact on national economic and political development. In the section
that follows, the articles by Shah M.Tarzi (Reading 10) and David Fieldhouse
(Reading 11) evaluate the arguments in favor of, and opposed to, multinational
corporations in the Third World.
Foreign direct investment is closely related to international trade, and over the
years, governments have developed policies to try to take advantage of the unique
characteristics of MNCs. Among the more common, and more controversial, are
strategic trade and investment policies. In Reading 12, Jeffrey A.Hart and Aseem
Prakash describe and analyze these measures, which typically involve a mix of
trade and industrial policies to encourage investment in activities regarded as critical
to economic growth, and which usually are directly related to the role of
multinational corporations.
NOTES
- United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, World Investment Report 1998:
Trends and Determinants (New York and Geneva: United Nations, 1998), p. xvii. - Raymond Vernon, “International Investment and International Trade in the Product
Cycle,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 80, 2 (1966): 190–207.