A foreign oil industry consisting mainly of private multinational companies competing in open markets has unique values to the Western World. Profit-… - Neil H. Jacoby

In many foreign nations, especially those in the Third World, political and social evolution has been such as to produce a monolithic state that lacks any clear division between a public and a private sector. Indeed, throughout much of the world today, official political ideology is hostile to the concepts of the private-enterprise market economy.

The growth of the British company population was not interrupted, as it was in the United States, by the economic depression of the 1930’s and World War II. By the middle 1960’s, the United Kingdom was more densely populated with companies in relation to its human population than was the United States, although the reverse had been true in 1935.

Because exporting and importing nations have conflicting goals, and the interests of individual countries within each group are not identical, United Nations efforts to regulate the industry have not been successful.