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“A New Imperial System”?
The Role of the Multinational
Corporations Reconsidered
DAVID FIELDHOUSE
David Fieldhouse discusses the impact of multinational corporations
(MNCs) on the development experiences of Third World states.
He starts with the “dependency” school’s view that MNCs reinforce
the underdevelopment of the Third World, and then reviews the
potential costs and benefits to developing countries of multinational
production. He concludes that the impact of the MNC depends
on the host government’s ability to manage its relations with the
firm. Many factors might affect the state’s position in regard to
foreign firms, especially the advantages of a host state in the
bargaining relationship. Fieldhouse concludes that without looking
at specific cases it is generally impossible to know whether an
MNC will benefit or harm a host country.A multinational company (alias multinational corporation, transnational enterprise
and many other synonyms, but hereafter referred to as MNC) can be defined as a
firm which owns or controls income-generating assets in more than one country.
The substance has existed for more than a century, but it was only twenty-five
years ago that it was given a special name within the framework of foreign direct
investment (FDI) and so became a defined concept....
... [O]nce it was christened, the MNC assumed an autonomous existence as a
special category of capitalist organization and was seized on by intellectuals and
publicists of many types as a convenient pole on which to raise their particular
flags. In this, of course, the MNC resembled “imperialism,” once the word came
into vogue in the later nineteenth century, though with this difference. It might be
possible to house all books of any significance written on the theory of imperialism
since, say, 1900 on one short shelf. The literature on MNCs is now so large that
books are published as guides to the bibliography. An historian of European overseas
expansion can hope only to know a selection of those works that he can understand
(that is, not in the shorthand of the mathematical economists) and which bear on
the questions the historian thinks important.
There are many such questions, but this chapter concentrates on one only: is
the MNC an affront to the sovereignty of the Third World, a form of imperialism