WILEY/IRM SERIES ON MULTINATIONALS Consulting Editor: Dr Michel Ghertman, Director, IRM Multinationals!.. 'Multinationals are using their economic strength to consolidate the power and wealth of a few at the expense of many!' - 'As the most advanced form of enterprise, multinationals are the favoured and indispensible driving forces behind social progress!' The Wiley/IRM Series on Multinationals aims to dispel such cliches. It aims to take the reader beyond the simplistic concepts of good and evil and to study a wider range of subjects than those remote topics only of interest to a few specialists. Multinationals play their part in changing the patterns of our lives; how we eat, dress, look after and amuse ourselves and probably-how we think! It seems important therefore to understand the characteristics of such companies whether big or small, private or public-and to learn about their complexity, their methods and ways of working, their relations with unions, governments and other social agents. It also seems vital to highlight both the present and future implications of the multinational phenomenon. The IRM's research is undertaken independently by academics from all over the world who are chosen for their ability to look at multinationals from the viewpoint of various disciplines; economic, sociological, psychological, political, and so on. Strict academic surveillance is maintained, again independent from the IRM, by referees who are specialists in the particular field concerned. As an institute for research and information, the IRM aims not only to promote and finance research on original topics, but also to make its findings available to a wide audience. Such information should be of interest to every individual and to every organisation concerned in the changing pattern of our society-and multinationals are certainly one of the factors involved.
Author
(Greek: Αργύρης Εμμανουήλ) was a Greek-French Marxian economist who became known in the 1960s and 1970s for his theory of 'unequal exchange'. The theory was an attempt to explain the falling trend in the terms of trade for underdeveloped countries, while criticising the different approaches of Raúl Prebisch, Hans Singer, and Arthur Lewis to do so as only half-hearted attempts. It stated, contrary to the then conventional Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson theory, that it was politically and historically set wage-levels that determined relative prices, not the other way around, and, contrary to the assumptions of Ricardo's comparative costs, that capital was internationally mobile and the rate of profit correspondingly equalised. What made the theory a heated subject in Marxist and dependendista circles was the theory's implications about international worker solidarity. Emmanuel was not late to point out that his theory fitted well with the observed absence of such solidarity, particularly between high- and low-wage countries, and, in fact, made the nationally enclosed workers movements into the principal cause of unequal exchange. By contrast, all subsequent versions of the theory such as those by Samir Amin, Oscar Braun, Jan Otto Andersson, Paul Antoine Delarue, and almost every critic since Charles Bettelheim, have preferred to make higher productivity the cause (and thereby justification) of higher wages, and 'monopolies' the cause of unequal exchange. Emmanuel's theory of unequal exchange was part of a more comprehensive explanation of the post-war capitalist economy. In Emmanuel's view, because selling had to take place without the income generated by the sale itself, there was a permanent excess of (the value of) goods over (the purchasing power of) income in the normal workings of a market economy. This obliged the economy to function below its full potential and made it prone to crises such as the one he had himself experienced during the Great Depression. By contrast, the boom of the 'thirty glorious' post-war years indicated that this normal functioning had somehow been evaded, and Emmanuel now offered the institutionalised rise in wages, plus a policy of permanent inflation, as the principal stimulant directing the boom in investments. Since neither the wage- nor the consumption levels of the well-off countries could be internationally equalised - upwards for both ecological reasons and because it would eat up all profits, and downwards for political reasons in the same rich countries - unequal exchange was the necessary consequence, in a sense saving the capitalist economy from itself.
