In the United States, the past twenty years have been marked by significant restructuring of both financial and physical corporate assets designed to strengthen firms' relative market position either voluntarily or in response to the threat of take-over. Firms have also restructured work systems...

The key analytical and policy question examined in this paper is whether multinational companies and their overseas investment need to be regulated at the national or the international level, in order to address market failures, and to enhance their potential contribution to world welfare. The...

Using the cases of Wal-Mart and IKEA, this paper takes a productive systems approach to examine Ôvarieties of capitalismÕ from the perspective of the ways by which production and market relations are structured and prioritised. It considers the nature of these relations and their interaction...

This paper documents and analyses the volatility of economic growth in rich and poor countries. It concludes that whereas volatility has declined almost universally in advanced countries, the picture is more mixed for developing countries. The paper then concentrates on the case of India, where...

Notwithstanding their remarkable recent growth, surprisingly little research has hitherto been conducted on the evolving geography of professional and business services in Britain. This paper analyses the results of a detailed survey of 300 small and medium-sized management and engineering...

Cross-national regulatory differences in safety, price and intellectual property protection are an inherent feature of the operating environment of the global pharmaceutical firm. Institutional, transaction cost and more recent ‘race to the bottom’ theories assume that regulation represents...

The clothing industry is regarded as one the most globalised industries of developed economies, yet most studies focus on the geography of production for US firms and pay scant attention to the geography of trade or to other national cases. This paper broadens the perspective to cover the whole...

This paper assesses the degree of financial and economic globalisation of British and German pharmaceutical companies during 1990 and 2001 and explores the changing balance between globalisation and national embeddedness. It tries to explain both the much lower degree of globalisation of German...