Indice
The study of the development models of multinational corporations is set to play a central role in the economic, legal and political debate, not only on account of the considerable and growing influence they exert on international trade and the domestic market dynamics, but also because the the structure of the international community that has been emerging since the 2007 crisis tends to focus on aligning public governance with corporate governance, in terms of private investors’ exerting a real and effective influence on the public governance of States.
Multinationals operate through sophisticated institutional and financial arrangements which is rooted in the use of a particular legal instrument: the ‘corporate group’.
Corporate groups are the dominant institutions of the world economy and represent the organisational model of multinationals. Groups and multinationals are two sides of the same coin. Statistics show that international trade is increasingly characterised by exchanges between subsidiaries of the same multinational firm.
By means of an in-depth analysis, the intention is to demonstrate that the corporate group model gives rise to the one-contracting party economy, which represents a destabilising factor for financial markets, as well as being an important cog in the machine of 21st century social inequality.
The research focuses on identifying those intra-group micro-economic dynamics that can influence macroeconomic variables, and consequently local and global policy choices.
The interdisciplinary and multi-sectoral dimension of the corporate group phenomenon – labour regulations, tax regulations, company and corporate laws, technology, etc. – requires a broader scope of investigation than the strictly economic one, to such an extent that it is more appropriate to refer to micro-systemic and macro-systemic aspects, and therefore not only micro-economic and macro-economic ones.
The new Global Value Chains (GVCs or Global Supply Chains) have transformed international trade and given rise to a new order in the international division of labour. The phenomenon has been traced back to a new era of globalisation that the traditional macro-economic approach cannot explain, at least not entirely.
The OECD acknowledges that the analysis of the cross-border activities of multinational enterprises (MNEs) has become crucial for understanding the dynamics of global value chains (GVCs), whose rapid expansion is profoundly challenging not only current economic knowledge but also the political consequences of globalization, thereby reinforcing the relevance of this study.
[1] Cfr. OECD, www.oecd.org.