Abstract
It has been widely observed that relations among domestic firms within capitalist industrial societies have frequently and significantly departed from the traditional realm of market transactions to assume the form of joint business arrangements, of a wide variety and covering a broad range of economic activities.1 This development has increasingly come to be designated ‘inter-firm cooperation’. Inter-firm cooperation has extended to the international sphere also, gaining particular momentum in the post-war period, and resulting there too in an intricate web of inter-firm relationships.2 While several useful typologies have been constructed,3 the nature of inter-firm cooperation remains ill-defined and its determinants imperfectly understood.
The author gratefully acknowledges the generous encouragement and advice he has received from Gilles Paquet as well as the helpful comments of Jean Laux and Lynn Mytelka on an earlier draft. In addition to the sources listed in the bibliography, the propositions advanced here are based on a survey of East—West inter-firm cooperation conducted by the author in 1975, which was supported by grants from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Canada Council. The Wiener Institut für Internationale Wirtschaftsvergleiche facilitated the author’s research in innumerable ways during his visit to the Institute. ‘East’ in this paper refers to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; ‘West’ to Western Europe, North America and Japan.
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© 1978 International Economic Association
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McMillan, C.H. (1978). The International Organisation of Inter-Firm Cooperation. In: Watts, N.G.M. (eds) Economic Relations between East and West. International Economic Association Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16000-6_12
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