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n state ideology,
the nature of political institutions and the nature of economic institutions
continue to matter a great deal. Gertler (2003b, p. 112) has argued that 'the
enduring path-dependent institutions of the nation-state retain far greater
influence over the decisions and practices of corporate actors than the current
prevailing wisdom would allow', while Dicken (2003a, p. 44) has concluded
that 'TNCs ... remain, to a very high degree, products of the local "ecosystem"
in which they were originally planted. TNCs are not placeless; "global"
corporations are, indeed, a myth'.
Third, claims about the decline of the nation-state draw in part upon a
statistical fallacy concerning the relative size of national economies and
transnational corporations. To take one example, Steger (2003, p. 49)
provides evidence that the global sales revenue of General Motors in 2000
exceeded the GDP of Denmark, \VaI-Mart's global sales revenues exceeded
Poland's GDP, Royal Dutch-Shell's global sales revenue exceeded Israel's GDP,
IBM's global sales revenue exceeded the GDP of Ireland, and so on. Putting
aside the question of what such figures might tell 11s about relative power in a
global system - \vould anyone want to argue that Shell has more influence
upon global events than Israel, to take one example? - these conlparisons are
the product of a fairly basic statistical fallacy. The fallacy is that Gross
Domestic Product (GDP) is a measure of the value-added of a national
economy, that is, the value of its outputs after subtracting the value of
national inputs that went into producing those outputs, whereas gross sales
figures for companies do not subtract these inputs. The problem here is one
of using two very different accounting systems as the basis for rnaking
comparisons: if the data is corrected to only account for value-added in both
cases, Denmark's 'economy' is about three times the size of that of General
Motors (Dicken, 2003b, p. 30).
Fourth, it is argued that the assumption that supra-national governmental
institutions such as the World Trade Organization (\WO), the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), the \Vorld Bank and others have real power independently
of those nation-states which constitute their constituent membership
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Theories of Global Media 61
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arises from a misunderstanding of the ongoing relationship between national
governments and these supra-national governmental institutions. Joseph
stiglitz's (2002) important insider account of how a rigid adherence to neoliberal
economic orthodoxies within the IMF and the World Bank - the socalled
'\Vashington Consensus' - could ride roughshod over economic
decision-making in countries such as Russia, Indonesia and Argentina in the
1990s, is a salutary account of how global institutions of governance could
llsurp and override both national sovereignty and local k n ~wl e d g e .A~t the
same time, the travails of