Concluding Remarks on Part IV

Our two papers on ‘New Forms of Internationalisation of Business’ are rather different. Professor Casson offers us a series of abstractions related to a new international division of labour within the firm, the remarkable growth of multinational companies in service industries that specialise in the purchase and sale of information, and a trend, as he sees it, in new forms of business such as joint ventures, licensing, contracts and the like. Professor Komiya, on the other hand, provides a largely empirical account of the recent rise of Japanese firms in foreign direct investment, although he concludes by putting forward his view of a general theory of investment.In the initial major portions of the paper he observes that the Japanese data on direct investment are as good as those of most nations, but that they are absolutely rather poor; he notes that Japanese FDI goes largely to the United States and Western Europe, rather than to the less-developed countries (LDCs); and observes the absence in Japan of large multinational corporations (MNCs) of the order of Shell, Esso, IBM, Philips, SKF etc., and the emergence of FDI on the part of many small Japanese firms establishing suppliers in the newly-industrialising countries (NICs) of Asia.