Suchergebnisse

Indian firms are moving abroad in increasing numbers to establish manufacturing plants with local partners in less-industrialized countries. As a result, India has become one of the few important sources of Third World technology. Indian foreign direct investment was the intended consequence of foreign trade policies designed to link exports with investment, and the unintended consequence of Indian regulatory policies designed to restrict the domestic growth of large-scale private enterprises. In addition, Indian overseas operations were aided by existing financial and technical collaboration agreements in India and by expanded collaboration overseas between transnational corporations and Indian private and public enterprises. These various factors have disproportionately affected the five to ten largest Indian industrial conglomerates that control the bulk of Indian joint ventures abroad. The experiences of these firms and of the Indian government in promoting their foreign investments have had important consequences for the domestic policy process in India and for Indian foreign policy.

Compared with Japan, no other industrialized country has so adamantly denied foreign investors direct access to its domestic markets. Japan continued to deny such market access until domestic constituencies finally championed foreign demands and successfully pressured a reluctant state for concessions. The initiative for these concessions came neither from Japan's principal government negotiators in the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) nor from public policymakers in America. Rather, it came from American and other multinational corporations (MNCs) seeking to exploit imperfect markets for the technology and related assets which they alone controlled and which a few Japanese oligopolists demanded. These local oligopolists served as manipulative intermediaries between MNCs and the nationstate and in that position determined both the timing and the substance of their country's long march toward capital liberalization. Between the legislation of capital controls in 1950 and the de jure elimination of those controls in 1980, what began as an extension of limited concessions to individual MNCs, eventually aided by small regulatory loopholes, gradually encompassed all foreigners supplying broad product groups. During the intervening thirty years, the MNCs examined in this article— including Coca-Cola, IBM, Texas Instruments, and the "big three" U.S. automakers —finally gained limited access to the Japanese market. For them, the formal liberalizations of the late 1960s and early 1970s proved significant, but not always decisive, as Japanese oligopolists moved both to replace public regulations with private restrictions and to mesh their ongoing political influence domestically with their emerging economic power internationally. Thus, de facto liberalization proceeded slowly and unevenly, at least through 1980, and foreign direct investment in Japan continued to languish. What capital liberalization did occur had little to do with the pressures exerted on MITI and the Japanese state by the U.S. government and the international organizations that America then controlled. Rather, American diplomacy proved successful in forcing concessions from Japan only when it was backed up both by the economic power of American MNCs and by the active support of Japanese business.

Regierungen, die sich entscheiden, statt allgemeiner Richtlinien für die Bedingungen ausländischer Direktinvestitionen diese Bedingungen im Einzelfall auszuhandeln, benötigen die dafür geeigneten organisatorischen Strukturen und administrativen Kompetenzen. Interviews mit Regierungsbeamten aus vier asiatischen Ländern (Indien, Singapur, Indonesien, Philippinen) und Unternehmensvertretern aus vier Branchen zeigen, daß die Verhandlungsstrategien von Land zu Land und von Branche zu Branche sich zum Teil erheblich unterscheiden. Zusammen mit der grundsätzlichen Haltung der Regierung zu ausländischen Direktinvestitionen sind sie von großer Bedeutung für die Attraktivität des betreffenden Landes als Investitionsstandort.(SWP-Spb)

Governments must choose between general policies and individual negotiations to reach agreements with foreign investors. General policy leaves nothing to be negotiated. But once negotiation is selected, governments face difficult choices over how to conduct ne otiations. No single choice of organizational structure or administrative process is optimal for all countries or for all industries. Each organizational choice carries a range of economic and political costs and benefits that are valued differently by the domestic and foreign interests affected by the negotiation's outcome. Interviews with government officials in four Asian countries and corporate executives in four industries, all involved in international business negotiations between 1978 and 1982, demonstrate that different governments should and do choose different approaches to negotiating with foreign firms. Even single countries use different approaches at different times and with different industries. Moreover, the managerial choices of structure and process are not random. Rather, they are influenced by a government's general strategy toward foreign investment, the "political salience" of a given investment, and the degree of competition among countries for a specific investment. Ultimately, a government's management of international business negotiations shapes its effectiveness in negotiating with foreign firms and in competing for foreign investment.