West Germans and the Japanese became increasingly proficient during the first quarter-century after 1945 at manufacturing things and selling them abroad. This translated by the 1970s into growing balance of trade surpluses with much of the rest of the world, especially the United States and UK. But there was a puzzle in terms of perceptions, in the United States in particular: US trade deficits with the two countries posed similar levels of political and economic risk. Yet, it was the Japanese who became the primary target of the wrath of the Americans because the US trade deficit with Japan by that time was larger than that with Germany, even though that diverted attention from a much more important problem, the loss of US manufacturing markets to German competition in third countries; Americans viewed the Japanese domestic market as far less open than Germany’s; and Japanese exports to the United States were highly visible. German exports tended to flow directly to manufacturers of other things, thus rendering them largely invisible. The growing prominence of Japanese products and names in highly visible sectors such as consumer electronics and motorcycles led to the conclusion that the Japanese were unfairly eroding American industrial dominance.

This chapter provides a detailed analysis of efforts on the part of the main players in the wine industry to simultaneously embrace black economic empowerment, economic competitiveness and environmental sustainability. It notes that while this ironically led to the spinning of a new web of certification, with associated costs, the overall consequences were favourable. The cooperative sector underwent the greatest upheaval, while the number of producing wholesalers increased greatly. There was also a marked increase in the number of private cellars, before falling off again after 2008. The reinvention of Cape was also reflected in the introduction of many new cultivars and marked improvements in quality. The most obvious success lay in a quadrupling of exports by volume in the decade after 1997, which absorbed the wine surplus in a context where domestic sales remained sluggish. The chapter ends with a comparison of different types of empowerment deal and an asssessment of how far the industry has been able to deracialise itself at the level of production, distribution and consumption.

This chapter assesses the record of the KWV under C.W.H. Kohler in the performance of its initial mandate. It addresses minimum pricing, experimentation with innovative ways of disposing of the surplus, efforts to build exports and measures taken to improve quality. A partial return to preferential duties during the Great Depression ironically created more favourable conditions for maximising exports to Britain and the empire. While self-styled quality producers exported wine, the KWV developed a line in fortified wines. The role of A.I. Perold and Frank W. Myburgh in promoting a quality agenda at the KWV is explored. The chapter briefly relates the tale of a tour of France by Myburgh, Andre Simon and Manie Malan in 1932 that captures the optimism of the time. The chapter concludes with a salutary tale of a return to overproduction and low prices at the end of the decade. Although the KWV, which was internally divided, was blamed for a return to crisis conditions, the Wine Commission of 1937 backed away from advocating the return to the status quo ante. Hence, the government of Jan Smuts agreed to the extension of KWV regulatory powers to cover drinking wine in 1940.

The purpose of this chapter is to evaluate and quantify the ways in which the immigrants’ presence and manufacturing skills contributed to the development of the cloth industry in fourteenth-century England. In order to do so, the scale of the immigrants’ contribution to the industry will be examined through the number of workers, as well as the types of cloth they produced in England. The know-how they exhibited in the host country will be compared with their involvement in the textile industry of their home county prior to exile. Finally, the chapter will touch upon the immigrants’ mercantile activities and assess how their involvement in the trade in cloth and wool allowed them to increase profits and ensure control over the whole production process.

As empires fragmented after the second world war, politicians in the Global South finally had the opportunity to determine the economic policies of their newly independent states. As many of these countries were relatively poor, developmental ideas came to the fore once more. This is true both in sub-Saharan Africa as well as in Asia. Nationalist movements in these regions combined their nationalist economic ideas with a variety of complementary ideologies. In sub-Saharan Africa, politicians such as Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere turned to socialism, which they interpreted as a developmental system. In Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, governments espoused free market economics, which they supplemented with an activist state that promoted exports. Argentina and Egypt, on the other hand, saw the rise of populist regimes. These provide another important type of economic nationalism. Populists such as Juan Perón and Gamal Abdel Nasser associated international integration with enrichment by domestic elites Because they opposed these elites, populists sought to cut links with the world economy and espouse isolationist economic systems.

This chapter presents the first annual estimates of Liberia’s economic performance based on archival data since its declaration of independence in 1847 until 2000. A lack of easily accessible data has been one of the main reasons why Liberia has appeared so infrequently in comparative work in African economic history. The collection of data was a central component of imperial governance, and historians have relied on the legacy of those efforts; independent states had both different incentives and, often, lower capacity. However, this chapter shows that it is possible to reconstruct through qualitative records annual estimates of trade and government finances dating back to Liberia’s foundation. These estimates then form the foundation for the first series of historical national accounts which can be used to compare Liberia to other countries. They show the Liberian economy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when many other African economies were growing. A period of rapid economic growth began during the 1930s, which continued for much of the next half century before a catastrophic reversal from 1980. This chapter sets the stage for the more thematic chapters to follow.

We provide selective account of how and why the share of Asia in the world economy has more than quadrupled in the past half-century. In 1970, Asia (excluding Japan) accounted for around 9 per cent of the world economy. At the turn of the twenty-first century, this had climbed to 18 per cent and today exceeds 40 per cent. Asian growth has occurred rapidly regardless of political system, institutional arrangements or policy cocktails. We illustrate how far the Asian economies have come and how far they have left to go to attain the living standards of Europe or North America. For example, in India and China income per capita went from just under 5 per cent of the US level each to around 11 per cent and 28 per cent, respectively from 1970 to 2020. The main drivers of growth have been the accumulation of capital and labour along with improvements in the quality of the labour force. We also concentrate on the features that are both a cause and a consequence of the connections world. These include export-led growth, the role of the state, political systems and economic institutions, but also inequality. In so doing, we set the scene for the chapters that follow.

1. To develop an understanding of the seven concepts of this book’s unifying framework.

2. To link specific types of transfers of firm-specific advantages (FSAs) across borders with the four corresponding multinational enterprise (MNE) archetypes of administrative heritage.

3. To describe the various motivations for foreign direct investment (FDI) and to explain the linkages among non-location-bound (or internationally transferable) FSAs, location-bound (or non-transferable) FSAs, and location advantages within each of the four MNE archetypes.

4. To define the ten often-observed patterns of FSA development and resource recombination in international business.

5. To explain the need for complementary resources of external actors, including those in the MNE’s stakeholder network and ecosystem, and the potential reasons for bounded rationality and bounded reliability when doing international business.

Tells the development of the vehicle manufacturers in Australia, focusing on their critical relationships with their parent groups. It describes the role each of the ultimate four survivors was allowed to play within these groups, and the consequences for their attempts to build volume and scale through exports.