Content area
Full text
Multinational Enterprises and the Global Economy. By John H. Dunning, Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993. xvi + 687 pp. Illustrations, tables, figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $58.50. ISBN 0-201-17530-4.
Designed to take into account the greater part of the large literature dealing with multinational enterprise, this impressive textbook begins with a short survey of "Facts, Theory and History" in part one, continues for twenty-two chapters and six hundred pages, and ends with a forward look at the "Global Economy" as it has evolved through five stages from before 1914 to 1992, including a brief survey of the contemporary world. As indication of its comprehensiveness, the bibliography alone occupies forty-eight pages and contains some 1,500 items.
The material surveyed is so extensive and the questions raised so numerous that they are impossible to summarize fairly in the short space I have here. John Dunning's basic argument is that a firm expands its production abroad when it possesses tangible or intangible assets specific to it that give it an advantage over other firms in adding value to these assets through its own foreign operations in specific locations abroad.
Around this view in part one he engages in an extensive...