International business and economic geography:knowledge, time and transactions costs

This paper sketches out how the ways in which a combination of economic geography and international business approaches can shed light on the spatial behaviour of multinational companies. The emphasis of the argument here is on the nature of the knowledge content embedded in the transactions of the firm with the surrounding environment. In order to demonstate the analytical power of these combined approaches we examine the case of an apparently pardoxical observation relating to globalization and internationalization. By adopting an economy geography-international business lens it is possible to provide a clear explanation of the observation, the result of which is that paradox disappears.