Alavi and Shanin (1982) hypothesised what is now the reality for many developing countries including the Caribbean today. They surmised “Suppose giant corporations succeed in establishing themselves as the dominant form of international enterprise and come to control a significant share of industry in each country. The world economy will resemble more and more the United States economy where each of the large corporations tends to spread over the entire continent and to penetrate almost every nook and cranny…” Thirty years later, due to the rapid pace of globalisation and the popularity of free market capitalism in many countries, what was once theory has now become grounded in reality. There is a Burger King or a McDonalds on every corner in many nations, oil and other minerals are being extracted with state of the art equipment and foreign technologies in
Dependency theory has always been at the forefront as it incorporates some Marxist concepts in that it addresses the issues of inequality and how the developed nations would have contributed to that inequality. Dos Santos (1971) stated in his definition of dependency that it is a situation in which the economy of a certain group of countries is conditioned by the development and expansion of another economy, to which their own is subjected. Anderson and Taylor (2010) stated that TNCs play a role in keeping the dependent nations poor. They highlighted that the executive and stockholders of these corporations are from the industrialized countries, recognize no national boundaries and pursue business where they can best make a profit. TNCs buy resources where they can get them cheapest, manufacture their products where production and labour cost are lowest and sell their products where they can make the largest profits, i.e. the Caribbean and developing