Yesterday Henwood furnished a URL for the Bureau of Economic Analysis--U.S. Direct Investment Abroad : http://www.bea.gov/bea/di/di1usdop.htm
I took the liberty of extracting out only the rows that included meaningful data for all columns and added percentages based on the following: 1. Net income divided by Total Assets 2. Employee compensation divided by Total Assets If there is any meaningful economic interpretation that can be gleaned from all this, I have no idea what it is. Just take a look at: http://www.marxmail.org/foreign_investment.htm and compare Nicaragua to Norway. Nicaragua: (A) Number of Affiliates -- 8 (B) Total Assets -- 147 (C) Sales -- 260 (D) Net Income -- 11 (E) Employee Compensation -- 14 (D) divided by (B) -- 0.07 (E) divided by (B) -- 0.10 Norway: (A) Number of Affiliates -- 182 (B) Total Assets -- 19092 (C) Sales -- 12836 (D) Net Income -- 882 (E) Employee Compensation -- 1855 (D) divided by (B) -- 0.05 (E) divided by (B) -- 0.10 You'll notice that (D) & (E) are practically the same for each country. So can you draw any meaningful inferences about whether the same level of exploitation exists for both countries? Obviously not. Bottom line, we have to avoid the temptation to do economic analysis based on such a reductionist view. There is no substitute for the concrete analysis of concrete class relations. Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
