Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 The dynamics of international trade and industrial location
- 2 Industrial-development strategy and the role of multinational corporations
- 3 Pollution and comparative advantage in industrial production
- 4 Environmental regulations and the industrial-flight hypothesis
- 5 Pollution and industrial strategy in four rapidly industrializing countries
- 6 Bargaining for the right to pollute
- 7 The politics of pollution and multinational corporations in rapidly industrializing countries
- 8 Theoretical implications and policy recommendations
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 The dynamics of international trade and industrial location
- 2 Industrial-development strategy and the role of multinational corporations
- 3 Pollution and comparative advantage in industrial production
- 4 Environmental regulations and the industrial-flight hypothesis
- 5 Pollution and industrial strategy in four rapidly industrializing countries
- 6 Bargaining for the right to pollute
- 7 The politics of pollution and multinational corporations in rapidly industrializing countries
- 8 Theoretical implications and policy recommendations
- Index
Summary
Economic historians may well look back on the last quarter of the twentieth century as marking the decline of the pattern of world trade and industrial production that had been the hallmark of the two previous centuries – the international division of labor under which a small number of core manufacturing countries accounted for an overwhelming percentage of global industrial production and a large number of periphery or developing countries provided raw materials and simple primary products to feed the industrial economies. This transition has been set in motion by a number of interactive forces, including
the ascendence of increasingly stateless multinational corporations bent on maximizing profits and minimizing production costs through the integration of global production units,
the internationalization of investment capital and financial markets,
the emergence of a new wave of rapidly industrializing nations in the periphery, and
the evolution toward “postindustrial” economies that has commenced in the United States, Japan, and a few countries of Europe.
In the midst of these forces – trying to shape, cope with, and stave off their impacts – stand the nearly two hundred individual nation-states that constitute the postcolonial political world. In general, the industrialized nations are trying to keep up the pace of innovation necessary to remain competitive in highly technological industries and at the same time to hold onto a critical mass of low-technology industries to maintain current levels of employment.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Pollution and the Struggle for the World ProductMultinational Corporations, Environment, and International Comparative Advantage, pp. ix - xiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1988