The multinational firm and international regulation

Writing about alternative international regimes to deal with direct foreign investment (DFI) may seem to be somewhat like discussing a perpetual motion machine: most people would like one for their own purposes; no one has ever built one; and discussions about their construction often take on a certain air of unreality. In contrast to the issue areas of money, trade, and aid, there is no important set of international institutions concentrating primarily on DFI. Numerous bilateral agreements and multilateral arrangements regulate or facilitate, in one way or another, the activities of private investors, but these have not been systematized into a coherent structure. Negotiations for new agreements do not take place within a large and semiformal international arrangement, such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and no large international institution, such as the World Bank in the aid field, exists primarily to give direction to activities in this area.