The Network of Global Corporate Control

By Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, Stefano Battiston. PLoS ONE, 2011

782 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The structure of the control network of transnational corporations affects global market competition and financial stability. So far, only small national samples were studied and there was no appropriate methodology to assess control globally. We present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along with the computation of the control held by each global player. We find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic “super-entity” that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e05f1392cfc6bb3c89d43a12f699555afe9deac1

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Citations in the corpus

DebtRank: Too Central to Fail? Financial Networks, the FED and Systemic Risk (2012, background): “billion for 3 months; (3) Peak and decline (October, 2008 until April, 2010), where the exposure peaks in a short span of time and starts to decline at a”
The Corporate Elite Community Structure of Global Capitalism (2016, methodology): “Although often depicted as atomistic and individua-listic market actors, corporations are tightly embedded in networks of corporate control (Uzzi 1997), ownership (Vitali et al .”
Plunder in the Post-Colonial Era: Quantifying Drain from the Global South Through Unequal Exchange, 1960–2018 (2021, background): “As a result, a relatively small number of firms from high-income countries have grown so large that they now control an overwhelming share of the world economy, with revenues that exceed the GDP of most sovereign countries (Vitali et al. 2011; Anderson and Cavanagh 2000).”
Liaisons dangereuses: Increasing connectivity, risk sharing, and systemic risk (2012, background): “The core alone is quite dense and not so heterogeneous in degree (Soramaki et al., 2007; Iori et al., 2008; Vitali et al., 2011).”
Structure and dynamics of core/periphery networks (2013, background): “About (3)4 of ownership of firms in the core remained in the hands of firms of the core [123].”
Integrating Finance into Global Production Networks (2014, background): “In a study of over 43 000 TNCs, VITALI et al. (2011) established that a core group of just 147 TNCs has almost 40% control over the economic value of TNCs in the world.”