Much by way of statistical evidence has been deployed to highlight the economic topography of globalization and it is only necessary here to identify some salient features before considering their implications for democratic socialist political economy and its evolution in Britain in the last decade of the twentieth century. Most frequently cited have been figures for direct investment flows, short-term capital movements, international trade and the significance of tncs, with these being used to point to the quantitative and qualitative changes in the degree of interdependence that have characterized the post-war international economy.

Between 1983 and 1990 foreign direct investment increased at an average annual rate of 34%, expanding almost four times as rapidly as merchandise trade over the same period. For many commentators it had, by the early 1990s, “reached [a] threshold where [it] create[d] a qualitatively different set of linkages amongst advanced economies”, locking them and the major corporations of which they were composed into a complex system of international networks and economic relationships. All this was, of course, part of a more general expansion of capital flows in the international economy that left the stock of international bank and bond lending at 25% of the aggregate GNP of western industrialized nations by 1989, as against 5% in 1973.

As regards short-term capital movements, with the abandonment of exchange controls by the United States, Britain, Germany and Japan in the late 1970s and early 1980s and France and Italy in the late 1980s, the last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed their dramatic increase.