Globalization, Technological Change and the Spatial Organization of Economic Activity

One of the most distinctive features of the globalizing economy of the early 1990s is the extent to which the cross-border movement of created assets is internalized either within multinational hierarchies or between two or more separately owned, but interrelated, firms¹ located in different countries. It is the contention of this chapter that the resulting international division of labour, and the nature of the competitive advantages of both firms and countries, is fundamentally different from that determined by the disposition of locationally immobile assets and the transactions between independent buyers and sellers.