Multinationals and Market Structure in an Open Developing Economy: The Case of Malaysia

The relationship between industrial market structure and foreign investment has been extensively studied in recent years, but almost exclusively to analyse the sorts of structures that give rise to multinational companies (MNCs), and then mainly in the context of advanced economies.2 The opposite chain of causation, from MNC entry to market structures in host countries, has been relatively neglected. Only occasional note has been taken of this issue in theoretical literature,3 and only a few empirical studies in developed countries4 and less developed ones5 have made rather desultory attempts to analyse it statistically.