ABSTRACT
Accelerating changes in global politics and economics have highlighted the importance of the US government’s policies in the international business arena. With the gradual decline in US foreign assistance over the last decade, the US government has sought, for both humanitarian and developmental reasons, to encourage American private investment in the LDCs. However, many corporations are unwilling to make such investments without some form of “protection” against political risk. Political risk may continue to be transferable, but in the future the corporate foreign investor may have only the option of transferring his political risk to the private insurance industry, which, unfortunately, now has a rather low capacity to insure. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book is an attempt to improve our general understanding of political risk through a review of the subject and of the “services” provided by numerous peddlers of political risk analysis.
