Enterprise and Competitiveness

Abstract

This book looks at international economic performance at the end of the 20th century. The book explores in particular performance issues connected with international business. It focuses especially on the interplay between economic and cultural determinants of the behaviour of multinational firms. Chapter 1 offers a selective survey of recent trends in international business activities, and explores the limits of conventional economic analysis to these trends. Chapter 2 develops a ‘systems view’ of international business. Chapter 3– combines economic and cultural determinants of performance within a single analytical framework. The basic argument is that, after allowing for obvious factors such as different resource endowments and different attitudes to work and saving, comparative economic performance is explained by comparative transaction costs, and that these are culture-specific. The economic content of a culture is related to implicit scientific and religious attitudes which are transmitted through education, the media, and personal contact within social groups. The last two chapters discuss more specific applications of the theory. Chapter 7 looks at the joint venture and Chapter 8 at telecommunications. This book as a whole illustrates the power of an approach which synthesizes economic and cultural factors within a systems view of international production.