PUBLICATIONS & REPORTS

Contents Introduction

The primary goal of this paper is to examine how the roles of foreign MNCs in Hawaii, and Japanese MNCs in particular, have changed over the last 2 decades. The major findings are (1) foreign MNCs are relatively large in Hawaii by U.S. standards, but not that large by international standards, (2) large increases in fixed investment by foreign MNCs were an important element of large increases in aggregate demand in the late 1980s and early 1990s and were both a cause and result of increased economic growth in this period, (3) the scale of foreign MNC activities in Hawaii has trended downwards in recent years and the decline has been much larger if measured in terms of fixed asset stocks than in terms of employment, and (4) tourism-related investments by Japanese MNCs, in particular commercial property investments, continue to dominate the activities of foreign MNCs in Hawaii, even though Japanese MNCs have apparently been selling off numerous properties in recent years.