Origins and Development of Global Business

This chapter explores how business enterprises have been powerful actors in the spread of global capitalism between 1840 and the present day. Emerging out of the industrialized Western economies, global firms created and co-created markets and ecosystems through their ability to transfer a package of financial, organizational, and cultural assets, skills, and ideologies across national borders. They have been major drivers of trade growth, which they often organized within their own boundaries. They have been shapers of, as well as responders to, globalization waves. They were also actors in periodic de-globalization waves, mainly because they functioned as reinforcers of gaps in wealth and income rather than disrupters of them. They were disappointing institutions for knowledge and technology transfer. In recent decades, the domination of global markets by Western and Japanese firms have shifted to a situation in which they competed as equals with firms based in China, India, the Arab Gulf, and elsewhere in the non-Western world. This trend is likely to accelerate as the growing fragility of institutional structures in the United States and the European Union further weakens the competitiveness of firms based in those regions.