Hymer, Steven Herbert (1934–1974)

Abstract

Hymer was born on 15 November 1934 in Montreal, Canada, and died tragically at the age of 39 in a car accident, returning from a winter holiday, on a New York State thruway in February 1974.

This chapter was originally published in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, 1st edition, 1987. Edited by John Eatwell, Murray Milgate and Peter Newman

Hymer was born on 15 November 1934 in Montreal, Canada, and died tragically at the age of 39 in a car accident, returning from a winter holiday, on a New York State thruway in February 1974.

Hymer began his study of economics as an undergraduate at McGill University and then received his PhD in economics from MIT in 1960. He worked in Ghana for several years in the early 1960s and then returned to the United States to teach at Yale from 1964 to 1970. He moved increasingly in radical and then Marxian directions in the late 1960s. Having been denied tenure by Yale – a common fate at elite US graduate schools for leftists of his generation – he moved to the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, where he helped found and then foster a political economy programme until his sudden death in 1974.

Hymer’s main analytic contributions flowed from his analyses of foreign direct investment by multinational corporations. As early as his seminal dissertation (1960), Hymer broke away from international trade theory, viewing foreign direct investment as a consequence of the particular internal contradictions of multinational enterprises and their drive to extend territorial control. Despite his short productive working life, Hymer’s work in this area had wide-ranging influence in both the advanced and developing worlds in shaping both analysis and policy discussions.

Though less widely known for this work, Hymer was also making important contributions in his last several years to the articulation of a modern, complex, analytically rigorous Marxian political economy. Some of his most original and provocative papers in this effort, along with his best essays on multinationals and the global economy, were posthumously collected and published in The Multinational Corporation (1979).

Selected Works

• 1960. The international operations of national firms: A study of direct foreign investment. PhD dissertation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976.

• 1979. In The multinational corporation: A radical approach, ed. R.B. Cohen et al. New York: Cambridge University Press.