US Foreign Direct Investment in Electric Utilities in the 1920s

Abstract

Abstract Considerable attention has been devoted to ‘researching the determinants of the growth of multinational enterprise over the last century ‘. Yet much more attention has been devoted to manufacturing, trading, and banking than to public utilities. This is certainly the case for US foreign investment in electric utilities, which has been a relatively neglected topic in the history of multinational enterprise. This is unfortunate for a number of reasons: (1) direct investment in electric utilities comprised a substantial component of US foreign direct investment in the period under study here; (2) these foreign investments were related, albeit indirectly, to an event of momentous significance in US economic history, the stock market boom and crash of the late 1920s; and (3) direct investment in electric utilities has again become a topic of discussion and action in the industry because of political and structural changes in the 1990s both in the USA and abroad. The purposes of this chapter are to establish the quantitative importance of US foreign direct investment in electric utilities, which was especially vigorous in the last half of the 1920s, to identify the businesses that made these investments, and to discuss the structure of these multinational businesses, including the extent to which they could be described as ‘freestanding companies ‘.