The "outsourcing" overseas by advanced country firms of particular parts of their production processes became an important phenomenon, but it was still a much more limited one than was widely believed. At the beginning of the 2000s, imported "material inputs" (including raw materials) accounted for 17.3 percent of total US output.3° Koechlin estimated that "outsourcing" accounted "for somewhat less than 4.8 percent of US gross domestic purchases and somewhat less than 9 percent of apparent consumption of manufactured goods" .31 Another study showed that the fall in "payroll employment in manufacturing" in the early 2000s had "not been caused by a flood of imports of either goods or services" but was:
primarily the result of inadequate growth of domestic demand in the presence of strong productivity growth . . . To the extent that trade did cause a loss of manufacturing jobs it was the weakness of US exports after 2000 and not imports that was responsible. 32
The diferent configurations of global capital
Not only did the popular globalisation accounts overstate the degree of mobility of capital, they also provided a much distorted view of what that mobility involves. Alan M Rugman pointed out that of the big multinationals:
Very few are "global" firms, with a "global" strategy, defined as the ability to sell the same products and/or services around the world. Instead, nearly all the top 500 firms are regionally based in their home region of the "triad" of North America, the EU, or Asia . . . 33
Half of most global firms were still operating mainly in their home region market at the beginning of the 2000s-including Vivendi, Pernod Ricard, Thomson Corporation, Stora Enso and Akzo Nobel, Volvo, ABB and Philips. Only six multinationals operated in anything like a balanced way across at least three continents-Nestle, Holcim, Roche, Unilever, Diageo and British American Tobacco.34 Most foreign-owned firms operating in European Union countries were based in other EU countries, where the predominant form of multinational ownership was "regional'', not global, with "US-controlled firms responsible for only 4.5 percent of European value added" .35
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The New Age of Global Instability