by By Joseph Joyce Global Firms, National Policies Studies of international transactions often assume that national economies function as separate “islands” or “planets.” Each has its own markets and currency, and international trade and finance occurs when the residents of one economy exchange goods and services or financial assets with those of another. The balance of payments keeps track of the transactions. But in reality firms treat the differences across nations as opportunities to increase their profits, and their decisions on basing the location of their activities–or how they report the basing of the activities–reflect this. Multinational companies are not new entities; they can be traced back to the European trading companies that colonized the
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by Joseph Joyce
Global Firms, National Policies
Studies of international transactions often assume that national economies function as separate “islands” or “planets.” Each has its own markets and currency, and international trade and finance occurs when the residents of one economy exchange goods and services or financial assets with those of another. The balance of payments keeps track of the transactions. But in reality firms treat the differences across nations as opportunities to increase their profits, and their decisions on basing the location of their activities–or how they report the basing of the activities–reflect this.
Multinational companies are not new entities; they can be traced back to the European trading companies that colonized the Americas, Asia and Africa. In the twentieth century, firms expanded across borders to get around trade barriers, to obtain access to raw materials, and to produce their goods more cheaply using foreign labor. Advances in the technology of shipping (container ships) and communications (Internet) spurred the development of global supply chains. Firms divided the production of goods among countries in order to manufacture them at the lowest cost before assembly into a final product. Shipments of these intermediate goods have become a major component of international trade, and intermediate inputs represent a significant portion of the value of exports .
This stratification of production has several implications, as Shimelse Ali and Uri Dadush of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace have pointed out. Bilateral trade balances, for example, are distorted. U.S. imports from China contain a significant amount of intermediate inputs from other countries. Measuring only the value-added by Chinese firms to their exports lowers its trade surplus with the U.S. by a significant amount.