
Introduction: Multinational Enterprise and Multinational Financial Management
What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom. If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry employed in a way in which we have some advantage.
ADAM SMITH (1776)
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
- To understand the nature and benefits of globalization
- To explain why multinational corporations are the key players in international economic competition today
- To understand the motivations for foreign direct investment and the evolution of the multinational corporation (MNC)
- To identify the stages of corporate expansion overseas by which companies gradually become MNCs
- To explain why managers of MNCs need to exploit rapidly changing global economic conditions and why political policymakers must also be concerned with the same changing conditions
- To identify the advantages of being multinational, including the benefits of international diversification
- To describe the general importance of financial economics to multinational financial management and the particular importance of the concepts of arbitrage, market efficiency, capital asset pricing, and total risk
- To characterize the global financial marketplace and explain why MNC managers must be alert ...