sharon sanders
Editor-in-Chief & President
Study says a small network of companies control 60% of the global revenue:
The network of global corporate control
Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, and Stefano Battiston
Chair of Systems Design, ETH Zurich, Kreuzplatz 5, 8032 Zurich, Switzerland,
email: sbattiston@ethz.ch
"The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network.
"In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.
http://www.newscientist.com/article...e-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world.html
From the paper:
:Cross-shareholdings, or strongly connected components (SCCs) in graph theory, are sub-network structures where companies own each other directly or indirectly through a chain of links (seeFig. S7). Graphically speaking, this means that they form cycles and are all reachable by every other firm in the SCC."
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf
The network of global corporate control
Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, and Stefano Battiston
Chair of Systems Design, ETH Zurich, Kreuzplatz 5, 8032 Zurich, Switzerland,
email: sbattiston@ethz.ch
"The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network.
"In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.
http://www.newscientist.com/article...e-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world.html
From the paper:
:Cross-shareholdings, or strongly connected components (SCCs) in graph theory, are sub-network structures where companies own each other directly or indirectly through a chain of links (seeFig. S7). Graphically speaking, this means that they form cycles and are all reachable by every other firm in the SCC."
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf