**3.2 The political side: Ideological oppositions, contrasting goals, government constraints**

Cross-border acquisitions and all the more foreign direct investments are normally hailed by growing firms to sustain their expansion either within their own continent or in further ones as well. And we cannot deny that, decades ago, these activities were often conducted in the search of low-cost raw materials and labor in Latin America, South-East Asia, and mainly Africa. As we all know, this implied in not so few cases also workers' and environment exploitation, that convenient branching out being accepted by 3rd World countries with mixed sentiments just to favour their own economic development. The situation concurred this way to increase the differences between big industrial countries on one side, mid-sized half-industrialized ones on the other hand, and developing countries to conclude.

Along years, the so-to-say mismatching implied by these attitudes of foreign companies (ranking top down from US, Great Britain, France, and others shouting "profits profits!") drew public attention to the political, social, and cultural realms affected by their actions and behavior. This way, in hosting nations, some backlashes

### *Our Globalization Era among Success, Obstacles and Doubts DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.105545*

against globalization were registered within the civil society and by governments as well inducing in some cases a growing unwillingness to progress in multinational cooperation, better in multilateral co-operations of such a way. In worst cases, not only NGO-Non Governmental Organizations reacted to reputed exploitments, but a whole theory was developed—*Race to bottom*—lamenting, be that entirely true or not that globalization vas disrupting local economies, destroying previous national cultures, diminishing basic human rights in general workers' in particular, and threatening the preservation of the natural environment till degradation in case.

The last critics overvalued real cases of that kind as they had their roots in the anarchist-*green* mentality, and generally spoke against the so-called capitalism as the dirty imagine of free-market economy; in addition, they more properly referred, in case, to situations belonging to the twentieth century. After the Uruguay Round within GATT (1986–1993) and Doha development agenda (ended 2005), and as well, concerns had reduced and—the literature says—largely, even not totally dissipated. As a result, companies are now looking not for exploitation if any, but paying attention to the following characteristics of the host's country:


Anyway, the calculus of costs and benefits has to be attentively weighted for both companies and host countries.

Companies gained only putative advantages, or even benefits shorter than expectations, putting into action egoistic behaviors, (un)voluntarily tending either to exploit or to make "easy money," taking advantage from their bargaining power irrespective of fairness, workers' /population/environment rights, in addition to the host-country interest in general. They must not only obey to these comprehensive ethical principles, but in addition to pay attention to the following technical factors:


On the side of host countries, on their turn, they too must pay attention to a number of factors, including or even mixing advantages and risks. General and special advantages can be resumed as follows:


Some critical questions stay anyway in the background, as they need a (preferably a previous or a step-by-step) solution:

