Changes in foreign control under different regulatory climates : Évolution du contrôle étranger sous divers régimes de réglementation, multinationales au Canada

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, much attention was focused on what was widely regarded as the negative consequences of increased foreign control.2 This culminated, by the mid 1970s, in the establishment of the Foreign Investment Review Agency (FIRA), the mandate of which was to monitor foreign investment in the Canadian economy and adjudicate proposed capital inflows. [...] Following the reporting conventions of the Corporations Returns Act, separate estimates are generally produced for non-financial industries and financial industries—with the former serving as the standard proxy for evaluating the magnitude of foreign control in the aggregate. [...] Beginning in the early 1970s, the overall presence of foreign multinationals in the Canadian economy began to decline, commensurate with the onset of a more restrictive regulatory climate. [...] The fact that the increase in foreign control does not quite offset the previous decline is consistent with an interpretation that attributes changes in foreign control both to reductions in tariffs and to shifts in the regulatory regime. [...] Declines in the share of foreign- controlled assets occur more or less continuously from the early 1970s to the mid 1980s—during the lead up to, and for the duration of, the FIRA period.