Combining literature from international political economy, international business, and institutional approaches to business studies, this article discusses foreign firms' relationship with the public sector in Southeast Asia. It focuses on the perceptions of the firms on host country policies toward foreign direct investments (FDI) and the impact of global financial crises and regional economic integration on the firms' strategies. The multinational company (MNC)-host government relationship is seen as a cooperative and continual bargaining within a specific institutional framework. Based on interviews with managers of subsidiaries originating from Finland, it is found that the regulatory environment of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries varies from easy to difficult with regard to policies, bureaucracy and protectionism. These pose institutional constraints for the firms, with additional economic constraints caused by global financial crises. Contrary to expectations, the ASEAN free trade agreement does not figure in the firms' investment strategies. This is explained by three findings: most of the firms serve the domestic host country market; the firms operate global rather than ASEAN-wide regional production chains; the firms represent industries that are not typical in Southeast Asian regional production networks.
The aim of this paper is to investigate how new rules and practices in multilateral, regional and bilateral trade negotiations related to the services industries can be adopted and implemented at the business level, using the recently concluded free-trade agreement (FTA) negotiations between the EU and Singapore as an illustrative case. The purpose is to put the services sector into the larger framework of business service interaction between the EU and the outside world by identifying crucial subsectors within the services industries and their relations to physical, 'visible' production and trade. Furthermore, to assess the prospects of 'multilateralising' regional trade agreements within the service sector, through the ambitions by both parties to make bilateral and interregional FTAs and EPAs more compatible and mutually comparable with the multilateral GATS' rules. The EU-Singapore FTA is an agreement that became a 'second-best' solution of the stalled interregional EU-ASEAN negotiation, taking place 2006-2009. It can nevertheless be seen as a 'WTO-plus' endeavour, since it aims at reaching beyond what is under negotiation in the likewise stalled Doha Development Agenda within the WTO framework, particularly in the fields of business services, public procurement, intellectual property rights, trade-related investment measures, and, generally, competition rules. Since both parties already apply low or zero tariffs in most sectors of manufacturing, the main issues in the negotiations were related to services in general and knowledge-intensive business services in particular, with an emphasis on technical barriers to trade. To what extent will there be a true mutual opening up of the service markets between the two parties as a result of the agreement, and what technical and mental barriers remain? This FTA, if successfully implemented, can also pave the way for a revitalisation of the 'paused' EU-ASEAN talks, in which Asia Eur J (2017) 15:75-105
Although the production of the built environment is increasingly globalized, and architecture and urban planning (AUP) professionals are known to be the key carriers of mobile ideas, the internationalization of small owner-centred architectural offices has gained little academic attention, compared to the large consultancies that dominate the global market. We bring together the literature on the circuits of urban planning ideas, the international movement of AUP firms and professional ethoses to explore the internationalization of small AUP offices. Using interview data from Finnish offices, we investigate the 'what, where, why and how' and find that they have entered specific geographically delimited AUP circuits demarcated by type of project. We contribute to the literature by identifying motives characteristic of small offices guided by professional ethoses suited to the circuits where they internationalize. Their ethoses may evolve in time and space, as they operate in new circuits. We propose that ethos-circuit coherence may contribute to the successful internationalization of small architectural offices. The findings open avenues for further research on professional ethos not only of architects but also other internationally operating professionals, as it may guide their decisions by other than a narrowly conceived profit motive.
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