“A common intuition among scholars and in the media sees the global economy as being dominated by a handful of powerful transnational corporations (TNCs). However, this has not been confirmed or rejected with explicit numbers. A quantitative investigation is not a trivial task because firms may exert control over other firms via a web of direct and indirect ownership relations which extends over many countries. Therefore, a complex network analysis is needed in order to uncover the structure of control and its implications. It should be noticed that, although scholars have long measured the concentration of wealth and income, there is no prior quantitative estimation for control. In principle, one could expect inequality of control to be comparable to inequality of income across households and firms, since shares of most corporations are publicly accessible in stock markets. In contrast, we find that only 737 top holders accumulate 80% of the control over the value of all TNCs (see also the list of the top 50 holders in Tbl. S1 of SI Appendix, Sec. 8.3). This means that network control is much more unequally distributed than wealth. In particular, the top ranked actors hold a control ten times bigger than what could be expected based on their wealth. We find that, despite its small size, the core holds collectively a large fraction of the total network control. In detail, nearly 4=10 of the control over the economic value of TNCs in the world is held, via a complicated web of ownership relations, by a group of 147 TNCs in the core, which has almost full control over itself. The top holders within the core can thus be thought of as an economic “super-entity” in the global network of corporations. A relevant additional fact at this point is that 3=4 of the core are financial intermediaries.” Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, and Stefano Battiston, The network of global corporate control, pp. 1, 6 arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf
Posted on: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 13:25:01 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015