Corporate and Products Identity in the Post-National Economy: Rethinking U.S. Trade Laws

In the global economy, a General Motors automobile may involve South Korean assembly; Japanese engines; German design and style engineering; Taiwanese, Singaporean, and Japanese small components; British advertising and marketing; and Irish and Barbadian data processing. What is the country of origin of this product? How should U.S. trade laws evaluate a product\u27s origin, if it is a global composite with research, assembly, processing, and manufacturing performed in different countries? Similarly, corporations have become increasingly global in orientation and operations. Even national corporations have lost their territorial ties to the state of their nationality. Through a phenomenon termed global outsourcing and foreign direct investment, and as a result of the transformation of the economy from an industrial to a postindustrial one, corporations are engaging in global webs of cross ownership and strategic alliances outside their home territories. The trade laws of the U.S. are replete with references to domestic industry, domestic corporations, and domestic products. U.S. trade laws, like those of other countries in the world trading system, remain rooted in antiquated understandings of nationality and national origin. Without a thorough reassessment of these two concepts, the U.S. responds to the challenges posed by globalization in a piecemeal manner, its trade laws vacillating between the pull of nationalism and internationalism. The Article proposes an alternative that balances the current global reality with the nationalist call for a return to the local. To the extent that a national market can still be accurately identified, its identification does not come from the traditional conceptions of a national corporation or a national product, but from the one factor in the production process that is still territorial rather than globally oriented: the national workforce. Any company that meets what is termed a substantial socioeconomic participation test should be granted the benefits of nationality available under U.S. trade laws. A product\u27s national origin should also be reassessed. Despite calls from nationalists to fortify national boundaries to protect domestic products and industry, products that are globally sourced are in fact the products of no one country in particular. Country-of-origin designations thus merely perpetuate this chimera of nationality in a world of internationality. The Article proposes to revise the interpretation of current rules to accomplish two objectives: first, to reflect the emergence of the postindustrial economy, and second, to address the nationalist fault lines required to ensure the continued political survival of the current trading system

Chinese Privatization: Between Plan and Market

Since 1978, when China adopted its open-door policy and allowed its economy to be exposed to the international market, it has produced an economy with one of the most rapid growth rates in the world. Cao examines the general framework and other related issues associated with the privatization debate of the Chinese economy

The Ethnic Question in Law and Development

World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, by Professor Amy Chua, is an analytically complex narrative of contemporary ethnic violence in the current era of globalization. Although such violence has historical roots, according to Chua it has also been fueled by free-market forces and democratization. The book is a forceful and provocative indictment of the current U.S. policy of promoting and exporting markets and democracy to developing and formerly communist, market-transitional countries. In her book, Professor Chua applies her thesis - that ethnicity, global capitalism, and democracy are a volatile mix - to countries such as Rwanda and Sierra Leone, Indonesia and Malaysia, Russia and Zimbabwe, Venezuela and the former Yugoslavia. As different as those countries are, they share a defining characteristic: the presence of what she calls market dominant minorities among the majority population - that is, minorities, such as the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, Indians and Lebanese in Africa, Jews in post-Soviet Russia, the ethnic Kikuyu in Kenya, whose spectacular wealth and control of the economy arouse deep resentment in the impoverished majority. This majority views itself as the true, indigenous native whose mission is to retaliate against the economically dominant ethnic outsider and return the country to its rightful owners. This ill-will is deep and historically rooted but for the most part controlled by autocratic regimes. Two phenomena, market liberalization and democracy, have exacerbated and inflamed the situation. The introduction of laissez-faire capitalism into such environments has benefited those already economically dominant; that is, the already-hated market-dominant ethnic minority. Simultaneously, the spread of democracy, in the form of universal suffrage and electoral politics, has allowed ethnonationalist demagogues to catapult themselves into office by exploiting majority rage against market-dominant minorities (p. 6). In other words, markets allow an already-rich ethnic minority to get even richer, and democracy allows the already-impoverished ethnic majority to get even