Industrial Collaborative Activity and the Completion of the Internal Market

In this chapter we consider an issue that will be of major significance in the context of the completion of European market (or the 1992 programme); what happens to industrial collaboration if a market is completed? This is in fact a key question in investigating the effect of 1992 on corporate strategies, while also having implications for trade liberalisation within a common European space and with the Eastern European countries. The major focus for our study is how 1992 will affect joint venture activity within the Community. Joint venture is selected in full knowledge that it is only one of a range of collaborative strategies, but in fact tends to be the archetypal collaborative strategy identified by the Commission.2 It is therefore convenient to focus on joint ventures, not only because of the growing importance of this corporate strategy in recent years, but because we can contrast our arguments with the Commission’s own analysis of this form of industrial collaboration using Commission data.