Читать книгу Sociology - Anthony Giddens - Страница 195

Among the many economic factors driving globalization, the role of transnational corporations is especially important, despite their relatively small number. Transnational corporations (TNCs) are companies that produce goods or market services across several countries. These may be relatively small firms, with one or two factories outside their home country, or gigantic international ventures whose operations criss-cross the globe. Some of the biggest transnational corporations are companies known all around the world, such as Walmart, Apple, Amazon, ExxonMobil, Nestlé and Alphabet (the parent company of Google). Even when transnational corporations have a national base, they remain oriented towards global markets and profit-making.

Transnational corporations became increasingly significant after 1945. Expansion in the initial post-war years came from firms based in the United States, but by the 1970s European and Japanese firms increasingly invested abroad. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, TNCs expanded dramatically with the establishment of three powerful regional markets: Europe (the Single European Market), Asia-Pacific (the Osaka Declaration guaranteed free and open trade by 2010) and North America (the North American Free Trade Agreement). Since the early 1990s, countries in other areas of the world have also liberalized restrictions on foreign investment, and by the turn of the twenty-first century there were few economies in the world beyond the reach of TNCs. In very recent years they have expanded their operations into developing countries and Eastern Europe, with China providing the next major challenge and opportunity.

Transnational corporations lie at the heart of economic globalization, accounting for between two-thirds and three-quarters of all world trade (Kordos and Vojtovic 2016: 152). They are instrumental in the diffusion of new technologies around the globe and are major actors in financial markets (Held et al. 1999). Some 500 transnational corporations had annual sales of more than $10 billion in 2001, while only seventy-five countries could boast gross domestic products of at least that amount. In other words, the world’s leading transnational corporations are, in some respects, larger than many of the world’s countries (see figure 4.4).

Figure 4.4 Top 25 US companies by sales compared with GDP of selected countries (in $US billion)

Source: Foreign Policy (2012).