ABSTRACT
For a long time, the term multinational company (MNC) was synonymous with American (northern) or European (western) companies. On the other hand, for numerous left-wing critics, this term has long been synonymous with ‘the northern countries’ where there was a correspondence between the interests of the economic territories and their companies in a world economy largely closed until the 1970s.1 The early twentieth century was an era in which what was ‘good for General Motors’ was ‘good for America’ and vice versa. The situation changed, at first with the arrival of the ‘global’ firms, whose major production facilities are situated outside their country of ‘origin’ and given the helpful liberalization of financial markets, the ownership of these companies has become more widespread. Since the 1980s, what is good for a ‘European’ or an ‘American’ multinational has no reason to necessarily coincide with the interests of these territories. But ‘multinational’ continued to signify ‘North’. It seems today that the current decade will be the one to mark the emergence of multinationals ‘from the South’. The foreign direct investments (FDI) ‘from the South’ are multiplying as are the mergers and acquisitions by firms from the South. This chapter posits that this evolution underlines two major phenomena:
• Multinational firms that are ‘simply global’ come into existence and these economic players become completely independent from all the territories, whether from their ‘territory of origin’ or any other territory they operate from; this evolution is not necessarily a result of exchanges and intercompany international commerce, but instead is largely shaped by the globalization of the intra-company production process.
