ABSTRACT
The primary focus of this chapter is a very simple question: have foreign multinational corporations (MNCs) become more important in host economies in the Asia-Pacific region in recent years? This issue, though important, is somewhat narrower in scope than those taken up by other chapters in this book. A key question to ask of the Asia-Pacific region is whether MNCs have become increasingly important agents of regional integration. However, this chapter argues that because of the lack of data it is impossible to provide an accurate answer to that question. For example, there is no information from home country sources on MNCs from Hong Kong, only limited information on MNCs from Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, and while there are a lot of data on Japanese MNCs, much of the data are highly unreliable in some respect or another (Ramstetter, 1996a). It is also impossible to assemble consistent and comprehensive information on foreign MNCs classified by country of origin from host economy sources. Thus, there are literally no comprehensive and reliable data on the economic activity of MNCs (for example, foreign direct investment flows or stocks, employment, production, trade) classified by source economy and recipient economy in the Asia-Pacific region (and most other regions). This makes it difficult to show how MNCs have contributed to regional integration.
