Why do national firms become multinational? Critically Discuss.
            
             We must first define between a national firm and one that is multinational. A definition of a national firm could be "a firm that's market is mainly in the country it sells into and has no Foreign Direct Investment in any other country apart from the one in which it sells into. A multinational on the other hand is a lot harder to define because over time the very nature of a multinational has changed. For Example in 1958 Maurice Bye began to see and recognise multinational enterprises (MNE's) by the definition Multi-territorial firm indicating that a MNE was purely given the name by the amount of countries a company occupied. By 1960 this had already been updated with David Lilienthal new definition, Multinational Corporation that has become a recent standard definition. Academics see a multinational in greater depth and again the definitions are always slightly different, J.Dunning defines a MNE as "...an enterprise that engages in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and owns or controls value adding activities in more than one country (1992). Dicken on the other hand believes "a Trans-national corporation is a firm that has the power to co-ordinate and control operations in more than one country, even if it does not own them." This illustrates the problems of defining a multinational although we can see that there are common themes. We can therefore assume for the purpose of this text that a multinational is"" firm that has headquarters in one country, but with bases, manufacturing or assembly plants in others. However Quelch and Klein argue that "Any company that establishes a site on the Internet automatically becomes a Multinational corporation."(Internet Encarta) Which would suggest that most large national corporations are in fact multinational because of the very fact that ...