Global Marketing Management, 6th Edition

HAPTER OVERVIEW

1. POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT – INDIVIDUAL GOVERNMENTS
2. POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT – SOCIAL PRESSURES AND POLITICAL RISK
3. TERRORISM AND THE WORLD ECONOMY
4. INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENTS
5. INTERNATIONAL LAW AND LOCAL LEGAL ENVIRONMENT
6. ISSUES TRANSCENDING NATIONAL BOUNDARIES

Business has been considered an integral part of economic forces. Indeed, economics was once called political economy, and as such, business could not be conducted devoid of political and legal forces. Although we tend to take political and legal forces for granted most of the time in doing business domestically, they could become central issues in international business and cannot be ignored. It is human nature that we tend to look at other countries' political and legal systems as peculiar because they differ from ours. We might even make some value judgment that our own country's political and legal system is superior to other countries' and that they should change their system to our way. This ethnocentrism, however, hinders our proper understanding of, and sensitivity to, differences in the system that might have major business implications. By the very nature of their jobs, international marketers cannot afford to be ethnocentric as they interact with a multitude of political and legal systems, including their own ...