POLICY-MAKING, REGIONAL INTERDEPENDENCE, AND THE INTERNATIONAL TECHNOLOGY AND INVESTMENT SYSTEM

This dissertation examines two areas of present scholarly research on international political-economic development: (1) the development and maintenance of the present international system, in particular, the fundamental role of scientific and technological capacities and development and the prominent vehicle of economic exchange, the multinational corporation; and (2) the potential for government initiated change in the system resulting from industrial policy strategies chosen to use, regulate, and/or promote regional interdependence. Scientific and technological advances create a new context for international relations: rapid communication and transportation linking international and transnational actors, changing strategies of conflict and its resolution, and, further, new and constantly changing bases for exchange. Actors vary in their capacities to promote, maintain, and utilize scientific and technological growth. The organization of the system and the characteristics of scientific and technological development (particularly the need for information, resources, and skills) suggest that actors with these capacities have a power to "set the rules of the game" in international interactions, using their advantages to ensure their position in the international structure. Following Baumgartner, Buckley, Burns, et.al., we called the use of this power relational control.;Our concern with varying scientific and technological capacities and their effects upon international political-economic relations and the exercise of relational control focused on one type of behavior: investment by United States' multinational corporations as a possible means of technological diffusion. The model of the present international investment system developed in this research illustrates the structural power of multinational corporations in the capital accumulation process. Using this model as a starting point, we examine the potential for change resulting from government attempts to regulate the investment system. We described three examples of government industrial policies which react to and/or promote interdependence: those initiated by the European Communities, the Andean Pact, and Japan. We suggested that regionally directed policies which included the development of economic and research capacities may affect the type, magnitude, and growth of investment in hosts, with the potential for systemic change resulting from shared resources, information, and skills. We examined investment trends and the relationship between host capacity development and these trends in each of our cases. We compared these results with trends found in other Latin American and European states. We found that some differences exist among policy participants and non-participants, but, that additional research including variables such as industrial structure, the regional corporate strategy (e.g., export orientation), variations in policy implementation, and alternative sources of host information would help us understand the complex relationship of host--multinational corporation bargaining and international diffusion of science and technology.