Now, many Third World countries from China to Bolivia are competing fiercely for multilateral investment. This places more power in the board room, some fear. But Mr. Lawrence sees the shift toward competition for foreign dollars as positive. In the days of closed markets and state-owned monopolies, countries and their consumers had far fewer choices and often were the victims of their domestic companies. But if you have Boeing and Airbus, you can play off one against the other.
China has the power.
Meanwhile, the spread and speed of cross-border dealings is leaving a widening gap between the economic and political arenas. From his vantage in the ivory tower of the Brookings Institution in Washington, analyst Wolfgang H. Reinicke sees a world in which government policy-makers can't keep pace. There's integration on the economic side, but multiple political arenas. As bureaucrats struggle to oversee the changes in the global financial and investment markets, multinationals face a messy web of clashing regulations on everything from taxes to labor to legal topics. Tax nightmare For James Mogle, a partner at Coopers and Lybrand LLP in Washington, that messy web of laws means seven-day work weeks and headaches as he tries to keep government tax collectors out of his clients' hair.