Restrictive Business Practices’, report by the UNCTAD Secretariat, April 1972.

The report by the UNCTAD Secretariat, submitted to the third session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development held in Santiago (Chile) in April 1972, deals with the restrictive business practices of the multinational corporations with special reference to the export interests of the developing countries. Since the world war, there has been a tremendous growth in the size and activities of many international firms. They have grown from the national corporation to the multidivisional corporation and now to the multinational corporation. With each step they acquired greater financial power, better technology and know-how and more complex administrative structures. They have subsidiaries and branches all over the world. In the course of the sixties they became one of the dominant factors in determining the pattern of world trade. At the same time, their increasingly restrictive business practices, which tended to adversely affect world trade and the export interest of less developed countries, attracted the attention of the governments both in developed and less developed countries and serious concern was shown at the international level. It is against this background that the UNCTAD undertook the study on the question of restrictive business practices.