Global Business Foundations: Markets, Institutions, Firms and the Logic of Cross-Border Enterprise

This chapter establishes the economic, institutional, organizational and moral map for the entire textbook. It explains business as organized human cooperation that creates, delivers and captures value under conditions of scarcity, uncertainty and institutional constraint. Readers learn how opportunity cost, incentives, demand, supply, elasticity, production, cost and marginal reasoning illuminate managerial choices without reducing enterprise to equations. The chapter then examines why firms exist, how boundaries between markets and organizations are chosen, how business models connect value creation with value capture, and how core business functions operate as an interdependent system. It extends the analysis to political, economic, social, technological, legal, environmental and institutional environments; globalization, regionalization and geoeconomic fragmentation; international and African institutions; multinational enterprise, global value chains and cross-border risk. African evidence and cases are analytically central. A Christian moral framework treats enterprise as stewardship and service, distinguishing efficient exchange from moral legitimacy and profitable opportunity from responsible action.

Keywords: global business; business economics; markets; institutions; theory of the firm; transaction costs; business models; African enterprise; globalization; cross-border enterprise