ISAS Working Papers

Manufacturing and service industries are now global and several transnational product and service companies have emerged over the last two decades. The advances in modular product design and flexible production process technologies, distributed organisational structures with multinational human resources, rapid advances in global transportation and information technology, combined with lowering of trade barriers by various countries have led to the proliferation of these company networks. Of these four issues, the last two are infrastructural and policy related issues and are in the domain of national governments. From the point of view of the company, wealth creation occurs when the products are competitive in the market and the economic policies and infrastructural issues are only a means towards this end. Thus policy-making should not be done in vacuum but with the due consideration to the product and the companies.