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To: Broken_Clock who wrote (22902)	11/12/1998 10:43:00 PM
From: banco$	Respond to of 116753

Nations are not necessarily the problem: "As Robert Reich, now U.S. Secretary of Labor, wrote in 1991 "As almost every factor of production - money, technology, factories and equipment - moves effortlessly across borders, the very idea of an American economy is becoming meaningless, as are the notions of an American corporation, American capital, American products, and American technology. A similar transformation is affecting every other nation." Three hundred companies now own an estimated one-quarter of the productive assets of the world. Of the top 100 economies in the world, 47 are corporations - each with more wealth than 130 countries. Their interests are global: as the New York Times noted in 1989, "Many American companies are shedding their banner of national identity and proclaiming themselves to be global enterprises whose fortunes are no longer so dependent on the economy of the United States." Such global corporations have formed complex alliances that blur the very boundaries of the firm. In the automobile industry, Ford owns 25 percent of Mazda; GM and Toyota are involved in a joint venture; GM owns part of a Fiat subsidiary in the United States; Fiat owns 48 percent of Ford's Iveco Truck subsidiary. Nissan produces VW in Japan, while in Brazil and Argentina, VW and Ford have combined operations in a joint venture called Autolatina. Such alliances do not mean that these companies do not compete - only that they also cooperate. Production increasingly takes place in a "global factory" where different phases of production are performed in different countries. When an American buys a Pontiac Le Mans from General Motors for $10,000, for example, "$3,000 goes to South Korea for routine labor and assembly operations, $1,750 to Japan for advanced components (engines, transaxles, and electronics), $750 to West Germany for styling and design engineering, $400 to Taiwan, Singapore and Japan for small components, $250 to Britain for advertising and marketing services, and about $50 to Ireland and Barbados for data processing." International economic institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, the European Union (EU), and GATT have developed powers formerly reserved for nation states. Conversely, national governments have become less and less able to control their own economies; they are more like the flotsam tossed on the waves of global economic forces - witness the inability of central banks, even acting in concert, to control the repeated currency crises of the 1990s. ("Global Village or Global Pillage," second edition) (There are six footnotes to the above section.)