Globalized corporations, or multinational corporations are prevalent in the modern era as telecommunication and worldwide trading practices have allowed companies to produce products and host services that operate across many nations. This provides a uniquely challenging regulatory burden on the national governments. First, it may be difficult to truly even understand which nation has jurisdiction over the corporation to begin with. With the speed at which a corporation can incorporate in another nation, it may be difficult to pin down this responsibility with any meaningful speed. The corporate responsibility may vary greatly amongst the different nations they do business in, providing a complexity that is not seen in single nation corporations. If one nation demands that a corporation allow for certain benefits to their employees in that nation, and there is another section of that same company that does not require those same benefits, it may detract from the improvements of the first nation, as the corporation may take advantage of the more relaxed labor laws in the second. International policymakers should allow for the investigating the ability for corporations to escape responsibility simply by moving which nation their headquarters are in. Often called a corporate-inversion, a company of one nation may change their incorporation of another nation to avoid a host of regulatory burdens, taxes, and socio-economic responsibilities of a given jurisdiction. This trick may work in the short term, but provides for a race to the bottom for regulatory efforts, especially when the regulators are often nationalized and not international, except in certain cases.

PDFPDF