Harnessing Globalization: The Promotion of Nontraditional Foreign Direct Investment in Latin America

Preface

P R EFA C E As a professor of international studies at a school of international business , I became interested in how transnational corporations (tncs) select locations for their manufacturing plants and how governments attempt to influence their decisions. I was intrigued by this topic because it had broad development implications. I wanted to learn to what extent governments, faced with powerful, mobile corporations seeking to maximize profits, really can ‘‘harness globalization’’ to advance their own economic development and the circumstances that make this more or less possible. In conducting field research on this topic in Latin America, I was surprised by how often corporate executives referred to their experiences with investment promotion agencies (ipas). Some were very good, others very bad—but all had made an impression on executives making decisions about where to locate manufacturing plants or other major investments. As I continued with my research, I became increasingly impressed by the extent to which corporate site selection decisions are influenced by this contact with ipas. In my interviews with corporate executives, government officials, ipa personnel and others in Latin America, I began to learn what made some ipas more effective than others. And I also heard frequent references to ipas elsewhere, which were considered to be benchmarks for ipas all over the world: the Industrial Development Authority (now ida Ireland) in Ireland and Singapore’s Economic Development Board (edb). Thus, my field research took me beyond Latin America, to Ireland and Singapore, to learn what made ida Ireland and Singapore’s edb so phenomenally successful that there were widely credited with contributing , in a major way, to the astonishing economic development these two countries have experienced in the last several decades. I wanted to know what lessons, if any, these agencies could offer to their counterparts in x  PREFACE Latin America attempting to do the same thing—albeit under very different circumstances. The result is this book. My hope is that it can contribute not only to understanding why some ipas are more effective than others but, more generally, to helping developing countries use globalization to promote their own development. ...