ABSTRACT
A point which emerges from the evidence for the oil refining and auto industries is that TNCs are increasingly sought-after as a marketing arm by firms just entering an industry. The significance of the TNC in its guise as marketing agent undermines the importance of ownership, for what matters in this context is access to otherwise circumscribed markets rather than actual ownership of the marketing apparatus. Intuition and a great deal of evidence suggest that the larger the plant and/or industry that is threatened with collapse, the less likely it is that the government will tolerate its disappearance or drastic slimming. Much of the political effort during that period was intended to foster change and to achieve some measure of economic interdependence between Western countries. The growing involvement of the state in this process of industrial expansion was seldom accompanied by any new institutional arrangements for co-ordination.
