ABSTRACT
Taylor and Gane commented that ‘Pacific-Asia is by far the region of greatest service growth’ (2002:4). This is a conclusion they arrived at after tracking a sample of 100 firms (including 18 in accountancy, 15 in advertising, 23 in banking/finance, 11 in insurance, 16 in law and 17 in management consultancy) and mapping the geography of these firms in terms of staff strength and office function changes, as well as the opening and closing of branches in North America, Western Europe and Pacific Asia between 2000 and 2001. This growth, however, has a particular pattern. As pointed out by Daniels (1998, 2001), while service industries have indeed been growing in Asia, the growing trade in services has been dominated by American and European multinationals. This dominance is reflected in the balance of trade in merchandise and commercial services by regions and in the net growth in services imports by Asia and the Far East in 1985 as well as in 1996 (Daniels, 2001:218). The continued dominance of European and American service multinationals in the global service industry is an outcome of several factors, as highlighted by Sen and Sen (1997) in a review of the literature. The major service multinationals in accounting and advertising acquired strength and expertise through mergers. There has been a long history of exposure to foreign markets, with the large service companies having followed their major manufacturing clients as these established production bases overseas. In the internationalization process multinational service firms established local brand presence through foreign direct investments rather than by licensing or selling information abroad and, where regulatory barriers were faced, these service firms have resorted to a variety of joint ventures and in the process developed a growing local clientele (Sen and Sen, 1997:1159, 1163). Besides this dominant presence of multinational service firms lies a layer of smaller, less diversified Asian service firms created by transnational business networks (Yu Zhou, 2000) as well as by the expansion of Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese manufacturing overseas.
