Transnational Corporations and Economic Development

Abstract

In1965 Kwame Nkrumah published a book which was to exert a powerful influence on thinking about economic development.1His thesis was that colonialism had been replaced by neo-colonialism, ‘the last stage of imperialism’, the essence of which was that ‘the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside’.2He went on to argue that ‘giant financial interests’ exercised control over nominally independent states,3with the result that foreign control was used for ‘the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world’.4