Economic imperialism is the "foreign control of assets and decisions, including where such control exists in fact but not in law",involving informal and postcolonial as well as formal and colonial contexts, and "implies the unrequited transfer of capital, labour, or natural resources from one nation or country to another".
A French Professor A. Viallate in 1921 discussed economic imperialism as a trade and finance phenomenon in terms of "imperialist expansion [...] dictated by the desire of 'the great industrial nations' to find 'outlets both for the utilization of their available capital and for the surplus of their production'."