The Strategy of Transnational Corporations

A working economist's study of the multinational firm: its structure, its pricing, its handling of intra-firm exchange, its rates of return, and its relations with the states that host it.

Astapovich was of the Academy of Sciences system rather than the apparatus, and the company he keeps in his footnotes places him precisely. He argues with Soviet colleagues by name - Belous on the mass versus the rate of profit, Khvoinik on whether intra-firm exchange can be called trade at all, Shishkov on regional differentials in profit rates, Ivanov on the very definition of a multinational. This was the Soviet international-economics milieu of the detente decade, and it did serious work.

The commission is legible too. In the later 1970s the Soviet Union had taken a position inside the United Nations argument over transnational corporations, alongside the Group of 77 and behind the New International Economic Order, and the closing pages are given to the two draft codes of conduct then under negotiation.

The dating repays attention. The Russian original is a Nauka book of 1978, reworked for English at the turn of 1982-83, and the reworking was uneven. The tables on the capitalist core were refreshed to the last possible moment - corporate rankings from Fortune in 1982, the research league table from Business Week that July, the American balance-of-payments series from that August. But the chapter on the developing countries, the longest and best in the book, still rests on UNCTAD and UN papers of 1978 and 1979.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.