Transnational Economic Processes

Changes in the structure of the global economy have resulted in a withering of governmental control of certain activities presumed to be de jure within the domain of governments. The international monetary crises of the 1960s have demonstrated the emergence of financial markets that seem to operate beyond the jurisdiction of even the most advanced industrialized states of the West and outside their individual or collective control. The flourishing of multinational corporations has affected the national science and economic growth policies of highly developed and less developed states alike by restricting the freedom of those governments to establish social priorities. Tariff reductions carefully and arduously negotiated on a multilateral basis through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), through bilateral arrangements, or through emergent regional economic organizations have similarly increased the number of relatively nonmanipulable and unknown factors which must be accounted for in planning a wide spectrum of domestic and foreign economic policies—from regional development policy or anti-inflationary efforts on the domestic side to the international exchange rate of a state's currency.