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Introduction
The first of the three postulates on which Buckley and Casson (1976, 32) based their theory of the multinational enterprise was that 'firms maximize profit in a world of imperfect markets.' This structural insight has proved as fruitful in international business strategy as it has in 'mainstream' (single-country) business strategy, where it has been in circulation for even longer. What is somewhat odd, however, is that work in this vein in international business strategy has tended to focus on the same sources of market imperfections as mainstream business strategy: small numbers and, often related, the business/usage-specificity of key activities, resources, competencies, capabilities, knowledge, etc., or their firm-specificity in the sense of being collectively held by the firm's managerial hierarchy or employee pool and inalienable from it. However, the obvious potential source of market imperfections added by the international dimension - the possibly limited cross-border integration of markets or, more generally, the possible location-specificity of key activities, resources, etc. - has received less attention. Location-specificity of the specific sort wrought by market segmentation at national boundaries is at the core of this paper.1
This paper consists of two halves. The first half contains a broad - and therefore inevitably compressed - review of the empirical evidence on the cross-border integration of markets of different types: for products (via both trade and FDI), capital, labor, and knowledge. The review points to the conclusions that, on the one hand, the observed levels of cross-border integration of these types of markets are significant and in many cases have recently reached highs without historical precedent, but that, on the other hand, the observed levels of cross-border integration are also very far from complete and, extrapolating from historical rates of increase (not to mention recent setbacks), are likely to remain that way for a long time. This condition of incomplete cross-border integration, referred to here as semiglobalization, is more complex than the extremes of total insulation and total integration because it involves situations in which the barriers to market integration at borders are high, but not high enough to insulate countries completely from each other. Another way of putting this is that semiglobalization covers the range - apparently broad as well as complex - of situations in which...