Government Policy Responses to Strategic Rent-Seeking Transnational Firms

The main actors in the world economy are firms. Firms seek to maximise world profits and thus to appropriate the rents arising from their proprietary assets. These include technology, management, knowledge, organisational abilities and other internalised proprietary assets (Buckley and Casson, 1976, 1985; Magee, 1977). By denying others access to these internalised assets, transnational corporations (TNCs) earn rents that enable them to reinvest in the next generation of proprietary assets, or ‘ownership advantages’ (Dunning, 1980), thus enabling a dynamic competitive path to emerge over time (Buckley, 1983).