Indice
The new world economic system therefore tends to develop not on trade between independent firms, but on a chain of companies – parent companies and subsidiaries – operating in a supranational dimension, all of which refer to a single ‘global’ firm, whose holding company is the management centre. Each individual relationship between companies that are linked by relations of control – or which are merely invested in – does not per se exclude trade flows of goods and services since, in any event, the relationship between even only legally separate corporate entities nevertheless requires the entering into of commercial agreements that legally justify the exchange, as is the case between independent firms.
It follows that the volume of these deals is greater than or equal to the unspecified amount of corporate transactions (acquisition and sale of shareholdings, incorporation of companies, mergers and incorporations) that shape the markets.
Outsourcing and the proliferation of corporate groups are therefore strongly interdependent phenomena, since the corporate fragmentation must therefore be accompanied by a formal business relationship – a supply contract – that can justify the exchange between companies belonging to the same multinational firm.
One of the fundamental pillars of the ‘new globalisation’ is, in fact, international intra-firm outsourcing.
The large-scale use of intra-group trade transactions is a phenomenon that has enormous economic implications, as it would mean admitting that a substantial part of domestic and international trade is carried out within the same firm – albeit formally separated into several companies – and not, as one would expect, between competing firms.
Seller and buyer would therefore coincide, the exchange itself would become a ‘fictional’ economy and the apparent competition would in reality be the expression of an essentially oligopolistic market, structured on a ‘one-contracting party exchange’ model.
The terms of the commercial trade – of the price or of any other significant decision relating to the internal affairs of a company externally directed by another company – would be dictated by the parent company, as it is formally the buyer or seller of the good or service produced whose counterparty is its subsidiary.
The market concept taken as a paradigm by economic science is unable to grasp the core of the new development of global production method, since it is based on the abstract and indiscriminate idea of the firm, whereby exchanges between independent firms and exchanges between companies of the same firm are treated equally.