ABSTRACT
The transnational economy has become dominant, controlling in large measure the domestic economies of the national states. In the transnational economy the traditional 'factors of production', land and labour, have increasingly become secondary. Because the United States is still the world's dominant economy - more than twice that of Japan - the American experience of the last two decades best illustrates the shift to the new economic realities. The traditional multinational - invented in the middle years of the nineteenth century by US and German industrialists - consists of a parent company with foreign 'daughters'. The top management of the transnational - even if all executives are still located in the same country - is not the top management of the parent. Each unit, including the parent company, has its own local management. Top management is transnational, and so are the company's business plans, business strategies, and business decisions.
