ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a brief summary of the main findings of the book. It then turns to some of the issues raised in chapter 1 concerning the content as well as the locus of public policy for strengthening industrial and innovatory capacity in the European Union in a context marked by the central role played by TNCs. The context of the discussion is one in which European society is faced with the numerous challenges created by a globalizing economy driven by strong institutional and technological change and generating tensions and unevenness in growth, employment and income distribution. Nonetheless, within this context one initial component of what might become a truly European economic and social policy to correct these tensions and contradictions exists in the form of the single currency and the European Central Bank. Policy instruments that have become almost totally ineffective at the level of individual governments, and the capacity to shape economic trajectories that has been lost by nation-states may well be recoverable at the level of the European Union. In as much as globalization implies a change in scale at the economic as well as the political level, the challenges it creates have to be answered at levels that correspond to this change.
