Indice
At this point it is necessary to ask how one can place in the economic realm an exchange that exists only legally in the economic context, where, quite rightly, the question is how to control the manager[i] and not how to negotiate the purchase price of inputs with an independent supplier. Ultimately, it is the law that gives rise to an exchange relationship. The exchange exists – because it has value vis-à-vis third parties, such as workers – but as it is not carried out between opposing parties, the foundation of the traditional economic rationale no longer applies. It is a different exchange from the competitive one, and therefore requires that a new theoretical approach to be developed, which addresses a truly fundamental issue underlying the current transformation of international trade: namely, that of economics verses law.
A renowned Italian jurist, Natalino Irti, clearly and thoroughly expresses the artificiality of the market, i.e. its dependence on the legal order that shapes its practical actions. In this respect, the market cannot be considered as a natural place (locus naturalis) with laws that pre-exist and survive the man-made artificial laws.
Thus, the one-contracting party economy, by undermining the idea of exchange taken for granted by economic science – and even by the supporters of the legal order of the market, which pre-supposes the idea of mine and yours ‘from which every act of exchange proceeds’ – , arguably represents today the utmost form of the disruptive power of law over the economy.
In the economic debate, the tendency is also to explain international trade through the study of contractual dynamics, which are expressed by shifting attention to the organisational structures of global firms. The distortions produced by intra-firm trade must in fact be resolved on the legal level. Without adequate legal reform, it is in the realm of legal disputes that the real exchange between the single enterprise and the various particular contracting parties, ranging from the state to the workers, takes place.
In such cases, the locus economicus is the courtroom, where the stakeholders of the subsidiaries attempt to enforce the responsibilities of the parent companies, i.e., the corporate group firm as a whole, in their capacity as actual counterparties.
[i] See Grossman and Helpman, Managerial Incentives and the International Organization of Production, cit.