ABSTRACT
By the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, there was no doubt that American firms and their counterparts from Western Europe were spearheading the globalization of economic activities through their cross-border foreign direct investments (FDI). This special genre of the capitalist firm has been described as the modern transnational corporation (TNC). Its rapid emergence especially since the 1960s became the cause of some serious political and economic concerns by the early 1970s (Vernon 1971). In economic geography, much attention during the same period was paid to the role of branch plants externally controlled by these TNCs in local and regional economic development in advanced industrialized economies. The analytical foci were placed on industrial linkages and decision-making in these branch plants and their local and regional economic impact (Dicken 1976; Hamilton 1974).
