ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION The United States is one of the most interesting of nations in terms of the evolution of its investment development path (IDP) during the almost fifty years since the end of World War II. During the first half of this period, the United States established itself by a wide margin as the leading home nation to direct investment and, indeed, it was the international spread of US business firms that motivated the development of what has become the field of research in foreign direct investment. Such basic terms as ‘multinational enterprise’ and ‘transnational corporation’ were coined largely to describe large American firms that had extended their operations internationally during this period. In the mid-to late 1970s, when it was in fashion to link multinational firms to ‘neoimperialism’, American-based multinationals became the target of a wide range of critics who saw these firms as ubiquitously dominating the world economy to the detriment of civilized society.
