Course Overview

The course approaches globalization from the perspective of firms, asking students to consider the choices that managers face as they participate in and shape cross-border trade and investment.

Career Focus

This course should interest any student who plans to work for a firm with transnational interests or investments or students with significant interests in the global and domestic politics that affect trade and capital flows.

Educational Objectives

The course aims to equip students with a deeper understanding of globalization and international business by focusing on three broad themes. First, we will consider the variety of domestic institutions and the relationships between institutions, markets, and competitive advantage. We will consider how various organizations of labor markets, financial markets, and regulatory regimes, for example, create opportunities and barriers for multinational firms. Second, we will focus on the more informal domestic “rules” that shape international openness and, therefore, the strategic environment for transnational business. These informal rules and bargains include the political coalitions that sustain globalization and the dynamics of international business in different contexts of economic and political inequalities. Lastly, we will consider transnational firms as political actors, creating and shaping domestic and international politics rather than simply reacting to the decisions of policy-makers.

Course Content

The course will be divided into three modules. The first covers the multilateral and domestic institutional contexts for international trade and capital flows. The cases will allow us to consider how firms succeed and fail by understanding, or failing to understand, the political and social arrangements, in addition to economic conditions, that surround international openness. We will also consider the fragility of globalization itself by emphasizing openness to trade and capital flows as political choices that are subject to change. Students will understand and evaluate, for example, the rise of the WTO and how China’s entry into the WTO affected international trade. The second module looks at varieties of capitalisms, meaning the profound differences in market organization in different countries and regions. We will focus on cases in which an understanding of domestic rules, formal and informal, creates opportunities and constraints for transnational firms, for example examining Shell in 1990s-2000s Russia, Google in Europe, battles between financial firms and states in sovereign debt markets, and Chinese firms on the “belt and road.” The final module looks at firms in contexts of change and uncertainty. Here, we consider the profound changes to the global business landscape accompanying the rise of illiberal populisms and competition, even confrontation, between the US and China, and the interdependence of technology and digital markets. We will look at how firms confront markets and politics in technological innovation and competition (data access and management, financial technology, semiconductors), in frontier markets (platform e-commerce in Iran and free trade zones in North Korea), and amid global hostilities (the US vs. Huawei in 5G).

Copyright © 2022 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.