Economic Development, Education and Transnational Corporations, Vol. 60 Book

Written by a very well-respected international scholar with special knowledge on Latin America, this book a useful contribution to the subject, helping readers to re-think about the role of TNCs in the different political and economic contexts of individual nations in the globalized market economy.

Mark Hanson’s incisive new monograph compares and contrasts Mexico and South Korea to answer the wider question of why some Third World nations developed economically and educationally faster than others.

Hanson shows that these differences are due to the manner and intensity in which these countries employed their educational, governmental and business institutions to acquire manufacturing knowledge from transnational corporations and how they used it to grow their own local industries. Whereas South Korea looked to foreign plants as educational systems and pursued with tenacity the new knowledge they possessed, Mexico viewed them as 'cash cows' that generated wages and reduced unemployment. Hanson argues that significant economic growth and improvements in education will only occur when driven by the needs of industrialization.

This book will be of interest to policy makers and academics looking for ways to accelerate development rates in Third World countries, as well as students and researchers engaged with comparative international development, globalization and industrialization.