Rakesh, the arguments you list from Tang as to why multinational enterprises would cook the books so that their US affiliates would be credited with production actually done in China make sense, especially getting under tariffs. But I don't follow Laudree and Kochlin's appliation of those arguments to Mexican maquilardoras. After NAFTA, there are no tariffs to avoid, and it would seem the main purpose of book cooking would be to lower tax liability. But surely these corporations have finagled better tax deals in Mexico than in the US. No? In which case, it seems they should be cooking the books in the opposite direction, and imputing as much production to Mexico as possible in order to lower their overall tax liability. What am I missing here?
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com