Introduction: Synopsis of Theoretical Development with Regard to Trade, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), and New Forms of Internationalization (NFI)

Vis-à-vis the problems raised in Part I and the great variety of international business operations described in Part II, the state of the art in economic theory is highly underdeveloped and therefore unsatisfactory. The main reason for this is the nature of the research strategies which currently dominate mainstream economics. These strategies deviate from a useful approach to theory building in the following ways: by trying to transform political economy into an axiomatically based hard scienceby setting standards of rigour and relevance which are based on the sophistication of the statistical methods applied and the robustness of the results obtainedby squeezing history as well as the study of institutions out of the research agendas.1