- See: Sidney Dell and Naoki Ishihara, The United Nations and International Business 1988, United Nations Institute for Training and Research.
- This term has not been able to impose itself onto the discourse outside the specialised UN fora where ‘multinational company/enterprise’ is still the proper and accepted term. Interestingly, my word-processor (MS WORD 7.0) highlights ‘transnational corporation’ as a spelling error.
- See: P Wälde, ‘Requiem for the NIEO: The Rise and Fall of Paradigms in International Economic Law’, in: N Al-Nauimi (Ed), International Legal Issues Arising under the UN Decade of International Law, Nijhoff, 1995, pp 1301–1336.
- Some of them are mentioned in the reviewed studies; see also: UN, A selective bibliography. Transnational Corporations, UN New York, Sales E.93. II.A.16, see also UN, Workshop papers on Foreign Direct Investment and Transnational Corporations, Annotated Bibliography 1978–92, New York, July 1993 (no other identifier). It is most instructive to compare the 1978 Report, TNCs in World Development, E.78.II.A.5) with the current ‘World Investment Reports’.
- Having served as an ‘UN intern’ in UN/CTC, then a junior ‘TNC affairs officer’ and several times consultant from 1976–1979.
- International organisations, in my now 25 years of involvement and observation, need a new theme every four to five years and have moved effortlessly from NIEO and TNCs, over transfer of technology, basic needs and the cause of women in development to the current—already obsolescing—leitmotivs dealing with sustainable development on one side and private-sector development on the other. In my UN practice, we used to have to re-package every five years well-established, and often very reasonable, technical assistance project proposals to qualify under the new tunes.
- Such sexist language would not be tolerated in today's world—his successor was later fired for sexual harassment when at the top of the UNDP hierachy.
- The Structure of Scientific Revolution, 1974.
- I am referring to the (undated) reports, Programme on Transnational Corporations: Training, UNCTAD (probably 92/93) and UN CTC, Technical Cooperation Programme (probably 1991), these reports can be dated by the ‘chief’ pictures of the then responsible UN officials, p Hansen and later K Dadzie.
- The K Dadzie-led ‘Training Report’ (92/93), op cit, therefore highlights that ‘The UNCAD Programme on Transnational Corporations builds. The capabilities of Governments to deal effectively with transnational corporations….
- I speak from experience: from my one (and so far, not unexpectedly, only) participation in a UN experts committee on ‘new trends’ in foreign investment arrangements in December 1993 in Geneva.
- ‘Laws frequently continue in force long after the circumstances which first gave occasion to them and which could alone render them reasonable, are no more,’ Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, III.4. p. 400, Ed R Campbell/A Skinner, Glasgow Edition, Oxford University Press, 1976, 1979.
- All these assessments are suppressed in these organisations and would have to be officially denied, quite strenuously—they go against the formal image of these organisations as being universal.
- The fact that large segments of the US public apparently believes in ‘black’ UN helicopters circling like vultures over the US contributes to the apparently irrational crusades of US right wing politicians against the UN and the regular blocking of payment of US membership fees.
- I remember a number of training seminars where six UN consultant speakers were flown in at great cost to meet five somewhat enlisted local participants.
- T Wälde, Ed, The Energy Charter Treaty, Gateway for East-West Investment & Trade, Kluwer 1996.
- T Wälde, The Law of International Investment: The Past, the Present and the Future—a review of three recent and significant books, 24 International Business Lawyer, 392–396.
Journal of Energy & Natural Resources Law
Volume 16, 1998 - Issue 2