The United Fruit Company in the 1950s

In the literature on multinational companies operating in the Third World, it is a widely-held belief that such companies are more powerful than the nation-states within which the companies operate. Dramatic comparisons can be drawn between the annual international earnings of a multinational company and the annual government budget of a small developing country in which the company figures are often several times greater than the financial operations of the host country. This position, it is argued, inevitably puts the host country at a severe disadvantage and leaves it prey to the purely self-interested decisions of the international business

Geography · African history and culture studies