The first two main sections survey the roles of transnational networks in alleviating problems of contract enforcement and providing information about trading opportunities, respectively. The next section covers how domestic networks influence international trade through their impact on domestic market structure. Two overarching questions unify these sections: how do networks affect efficiency, and will networks grow or shrink in importance for international trade over time. The last main sections develop research agendas for two less studied areas: the role of intermediaries who can connect foreign agents to domestic networks and the ability of transnational production networks to facilitate technology transfer.

Business and Social Networks in International Trade

After World War II a select number of countries outside Japan and the West-those that Alice Amsden calls "the rest"-gained market share in modern industries and altered global competition. By 2000, a great divide had developed within "the rest", the lines drawn according to prewar manufacturing experience and equality in income distribution. China, India, Korea and Taiwan had built their own national manufacturing enterprises that were investing heavily in R&D. Their developmental states had transformed themselves into champions of science and technology. By contrast, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico had experienced a wave of acquisitions and mergers that left even more of their leading enterprises controlled by multinational firms. The developmental states of Mexico and Turkey had become hand-tied by membership in NAFTA and the European Union. Which model of late industrialization will prevail, the "independent" or the "integrationist," is a question that challenges the twenty-first century.

http://disciplinas.stoa.usp.br/pluginfile.php/347405/mod_resource/content/1/Amsden%20Rise%20of%20the%20Rest%20caps%2067.pdf

The Rise of "The Rest": Challenges to the West from Late-Industrializing Economies

Business groups in emerging economies result when entrepreneurs and firms accumulate the capability for repeated industry entry. Such a capability, however, can be maintained as a valuable, rare, a...

Business Groups in Emerging Economies: A Resource-Based View

Executive Overview The traditional American model of multinational enterprise (MNE), characterized by foreign direct investment (FDI) aimed at exploiting firm-specific capabilities developed at home and a gradual country-by-country approach of internationalization, dominated the global economy during much of the post-World War II period. In the last two decades, however, new MNEs from emerging, upper-middle-income, or oil-rich countries have followed completely different patterns of international expansion. In this paper we analyze the processes through which these firms became MNEs and to what extent we need a new theory to explain their international growth.

/pdf/the-american-model-of-the-multinational-firm-and-the-new-3kj79c2dil.pdf

The American Model of the Multinational Firm and the “New” Multinationals From Emerging Economies

The American Model of the Multinational Firm and the "New" Multinationals From Emerging

Abstract While huge family-owned conglomerates, the chaebol, have dominated Korean business, smaller guanxiqiye, interlocking family-based firms, have proved equally formidable in Taiwan. In his account of business-state relations, forms of financing, and the organization of trading companies in the two cases, Fields rejects both culturalreductionist and rational choice explanations for differences between the two countries. He offers instead an innovative institutional approach that focuses on the complex linkages between social networks and political power.

Karl Fields

Papers

Enterprise and the State in Korea and Taiwan

Strong States and Business Organization in Korea and Taiwan

Not of a Piece: Developmental States, Industrial Policy and Evolving Patterns of Capitalism in Japan, Korea and Taiwan

Beyond Late Development: Taiwan's Upgrading Policies.

KMT, Inc. : Liberalization, democratization, and the future of politics in business