The paper raises questions about the validity of a variety of strongly held views on the multinational corporations, questioning whether there are in fact a great many new forms, and the staying power of some forms alleged to be new, particularly joint ventures, turnkey projects and self-liquidating investments. If further raises the issue whether recent take-overs of multinational corporations in leveraged buyouts, fol lowed by a break-up and sale of various subsidiaries to different buyers, may not testify against popular theory that the multinational corporations came into being to internalize what would otherwise be external economies for separate firms dealing with one another vertically. The same scepticism applies to whether the multinational corporation is a unit rather than an agglomeration of separate entities, a question raised by the unitary tax on corporate profits in several tax jurisdictions.