The Role of TNCs in Poland's East-West Trade
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30, 1985.
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JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS STUDIES, SUMMER 1985
(1976), who carefully scrutinized relevant business periodicals and came up with rough estimates. This paper presents the results of a research project which was aimed at filling this information gap with respect to the activities of TNCs in East European markets.2 The data used in this paper have been collected on both the role of TNCs in Polish commodity trade and on their involvement in the more advanced forms of economic cooperation. DATAAND METHODOLOGY
A computerized data bank was created3 for the purpose of measuring the share of Poland's exports and imports which can be attributed to its commercial relations with TNCs, and a preliminary list of 166 TNCs actively participating in East-West trade was compiled. The selection was made from Fortune's lists of the 500 largest U.S. and top 500 non-U.S. industrial corporations. This list of parent companies was further supplemented by their majority-owned subsidiaries derived from the Who Owns Whom directory. Next, a computerized search system was developed which enabled identification of commercial transactions conducted by the Polish partners (foreign trade organizations-FTOs) with TNCs (parent companies and majority-owned
subsidiaries). This was achieved through direct access
to the computerized statistical data base on Poland's commodity trade operated by the Foreign Trade Data Centre. This data base contains principal information on each commercial transaction including the name and address of the foreign partner. By these means it was possible to obtain reliable data for four consecutive years, 1979 through 1982. However, since some of the smaller FTOs have not provided to the centralized statistical system data enabling identification of their foreign partners, the analysis did not cover all Polish EastWest trade transactions. The coverage ratio was 51 percent of Polish exports and 57 percent of imports in 1979, 69 and 57 percent in 1980, 70 and 53 percent in 1981, and 64 and 63 percent in 1982, respectively. The results (that is, the relative share of TNCs) for 1979 were almost identical with those for 1980. In view of the broader empirical base available for 1980, only 1980 figures are presented in this article. The preliminary results for 1981 and 1982 are discussed separately, in view of the consequences of the recent economic and political crises in Poland and their effect on Polish East-Westtrade. In order to collect and aggregate data on advanced forms of economic cooperation-that is, licensing, industrial collaboration and establishment of commercial representation offices and technical information bureaus by Western firms4 in Poland-simple, manual techniques were used although the analysis wasmuchmore complex thanfor commodity trade transactions. The major difference resulted from the fact that all contracts and ag
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