iness should be aware of the legal and political aspects of international trade.
Each of the world's hundred fifty odd independent and sovereign nations has its own system of legal rules and its own political culture and climate. Broadly speaking, however, the world's nations could at the beginning of the 1990s be divided into six broad categories: developed, newly industrialized, formerly communist, communist, underdeveloped, and drastically underdeveloped. Nations within each group vary widely, and there are borderline cases for each group, but this distinctions can still assist us in understanding the patterns of government relations with business.
The "First World" of developed, industrialized countries Canada, Britain, Germany, Japan, and so on, not to mention the United States itself possess broadly democratic political institutions and primarily market oriented economies. These countries are generally safe and comfortable for doing business in, with stable governments and predictable institutional conditions. Moreover, the trend through the 1980s was for these countries (and, indeed, most of the world) to move increasingly in a free market direction that gave greater latitude to international business. Nevertheless, most of these countries accept greater governmental interference in business than does the United States. Typical areas of concern and regulation include employment, balance of payments, taxation, "antitrust" (to use the American term), national sovereignty, and information disclosure (Grosse & Kujawa, 1988, p. 584). Even Canada, of all the world's nations the most similar in culture to the United States, has a business regulation culture and nationalistic concerns which are quite different from the American experience (Winberg, 1987, pp. 2-21).
The second major grouping, the "newly industrialized countries," is an essentially East Asian phenomenon, referring mainly to what are sometimes c...