Um estudo de economistas e estatísticos, publicado na Suíça neste Verão, dá a conhecer as interligações entre as multinacionais mundiais. E revela que um pequeno grupo de actores económicos – sociedades financeiras ou grupos industriais – domina a grande maioria do capital de dezenas de milhares de empresas no mundo. Por Ivan du Roy
Wall Street - Foto de Michael Aston/Flickr
O seu estudo, na fronteira da economia, da finança, das matemáticas e da estatística, é arrepiante. Três jovens investigadores do Instituto federal de tecnologia de Zurique1 examinaram as interacções financeiras entre multinacionais do mundo inteiro. O seu trabalho - “The network of global corporate control” (“a rede de controlo global das transnacionais”) - examina um painel de 43.000 empresas transnacionais (“transnacional corporations”) seleccionadas na lista da OCDE. Eles dão a conhecer as interligações financeiras complexas entre estas “entidades” económicas: parte do capital detido, inclusive nas filiais ou nas holdings, participação cruzada, participação indirecta no capital...
Resultado: 80% do valor do conjunto das 43.000 multinacionais estudadas é controlado por 737 “entidades”: bancos, companhias de seguros ou grandes grupos industriais. O monopólio da posse capital não fica por aí. “Por uma rede complexa de participações”, 147 multinacionais, controlando-se entre si, possuem 40% do valor económico e financeiro de todas as multinacionais do mundo inteiro.
Uma super entidade de 50 grandes detentores de capitais
Por fim, neste grupo de 147 multinacionais, 50 grandes detentores de capital formam o que os autores chamam uma “super entidade”. [o alto comando da economia capitalista mundial presente] Nela encontram-se principalmente bancos: o britânico Barclays à cabeça, assim como as “stars” de Wall Street (JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley...). Mas também seguradoras e grupos bancários franceses: Axa, Natixis, Société générale, o grupo Banque populaire-Caisse d'épargne ou BNP-Paribas. Os principais clientes dos hedge funds e outras carteiras de investimentos geridos por estas instituições são por conseguinte, mecanicamente, os donos do mundo.
Esta concentração levanta questões sérias. Para os autores, “uma rede financeira densamente ligada torna-se muito sensível ao risco sistémico”. Alguns recuam perante esta “super entidade”, e é o mundo que treme, como o provou a crise do subprime. Por outro lado, os autores levantam o problema das graves consequências que põe uma tal concentração. Que um punhado de fundos de investimento e de detentores de capital, situados no coração destas interligações [topologia do "novelo de remendos", ou bowl-tie network], decidam, por via das assembleias gerais de accionistas ou pela sua presença nos conselhos de administração, impor reestruturações nas empresas que eles controlam... e os efeitos poderão ser devastadores. Por fim, que influência poderão exercer sobre os Estados e as políticas públicas se adoptarem uma estratégia comum? A resposta encontra-se provavelmente nos actuais planos de austeridade.
Artigo de Ivan du Roy, publicado em Basta!, traduzido por Carlos Santos para esquerda.net
O estudo em inglês pode ser descarregado aqui
1 O italiano Stefano Battiston, que passou pelo laboratório de física estatística da École normale supérieure, o suíço James B. Glattfelder, especialista em redes complexas, e a economista italiana Stefania Vitali.
Network Topology
The computation of control requires a prior analysis of the topology. In terms of connectivity, the network consists of many small connected components, but the largest one (3/4 of all nodes) contains all the top TNCs by economic value, accounting for 94.2% of the total TNC operating revenue (Tbl. 1). Besides the usual network statistics (Figs. S5, S6), two topological properties are the most relevant to the focus of this work. The first is the abundance of cycles of length two (mutual cross-shareholdings) or greater (Fig. S7 and SI Appendix, Sec. 7), which are well studied motifs in corporate governance [19]. A generalization is a strongly connected component (SCC), i.e., a set of firms in which every member owns directly and/or indirectly shares in every other member. This kind of structures, so far observed only in small samples, has explanations such as anti-takeover strategies, reduction of transaction costs, risk sharing, increasing trust and groups of interest [20]. No matter its origin, however, it weakens market competition [13, 14].
The second characteristics is that the largest connect component contains only one dominant strongly connected component (1347 nodes). Thus, similar to the WWW, the TNC network has a bow-tie structure [21] (see Fig. 2 A and SI Appendix, Sec. 6). Its peculiarity is that the strongly connected component, or core, is very small compared to the other sections of the bow-tie, and
that the out-section is significantly larger than the in-section and the tubes and tendrils (Fig. 2 B and Tbl. 1). The core is also very densely connected, with members having, on average, ties to 20 other members (Fig. 2 C, D). As a result, about 3/4 of the ownership of firms in the core remains in the hands of firms of the core itself. In other words, this is a tightly-knit group of corporations that cumulatively hold the majority share of each other.
Notice that the cross-country analysis of [11] found that only a few of the national ownership networks are bow-ties, and, importantly, for the Anglo-Saxon countries, the main strongly connected components are big compared to the network size.
Concentration of Control
The topological analysis carried out so far does not consider the diverse economic value of firms.
We thus compute the network control that economic actors (including TNCs) gain over the TNCs’value (operating revenue) and we address the question of how much this control is concentrated and who are the top control holders. See Fig. S3 for the distribution of control and operating revenue.
It should be noticed that, although scholars have long measured the concentration of wealth and income [22], there is no prior quantitative estimation for control. Constructing a Lorenz-like curve (Fig. 3) allows one to identify the fraction of top holders holding cumulatively 80% of the total network control. Thus, the smaller this fraction, the higher the concentration. 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). The corresponding level of concentration is
1 = 0:61%, to be compared with 2 = 4:35% for operating revenue. Other
sensible comparisons include: income distribution in developed countries with 3 5%��10% [22] and corporate revenue in Fortune1000 ( 4 30% in 2009). 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. The results are robust with respect to the models used to estimate control, see Fig. 3 and Tbls. S2, S3.
Discussion
The fact that control is highly concentrated in the hands of few top holders does not determine if and how they are interconnected. It is only by combining topology with control ranking that we obtain a full characterization of the structure of control. A first question we are now able to answer is where the top actors are located in the bow-tie. As the reader may by now suspect, powerful actors tend to belong to the core. In fact, the location of a TNC in the network does matter. For instance, a randomly chosen TNC in the core has about 50% chance of also being among the top holders, compared to, e.g., 6% for the in-section (Tbl. S4). A second question concerns what share of total control each component of the bow-tie holds. 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. Fig. 2 D shows a small subset of well-known financial players and their links, providing an idea of the level of entanglement of the entire core.
This remarkable finding raises at least two questions that are fundamental to the understanding of the functioning of the global economy. Firstly, what are the implication for global financial stability? It is known that financial institutions establish financial contracts, such as lending or credit derivatives, with several other institutions. This allows them to diversify risk, but, at the same time, it also exposes them to contagion [15]. Unfortunately, information on these contracts is usually not disclosed due to strategic reasons. However, in various countries, the existence of such financial ties is correlated with the existence of ownership relations [23]. Thus, in the hypothesis that the structure of the ownership network is a good proxy for that of the financial network, this implies that the global financial network is also very intricate. Recent works have shown that when a financial network is very densely connected it is prone to systemic risk [24, 16]. Indeed, while in good times the network is seemingly robust, in bad times firms go into distress simultaneously. This knife-edge property [25, 26] was witnessed during the recent
financial turmoil.
Secondly, what are the implications for market competition? Since many TNCs in the core have overlapping domains of activity, the fact that they are connected by ownership relations could facilitate the formation of blocs, which would hamper market competition [14]. Remarkably, the existence of such a core in the global market was never documented before and thus, so far, no scientific study demonstrates or excludes that this international “super-entity” has ever acted as a bloc. However, some examples suggest that this is not an unlikely scenario. For instance, previous studies have shown how even small cross-shareholding structures, at a national level, can affect market competition in sectors such as airline, automobile and steel, as well as the financial one
[14, 13]. At the same time, antitrust institutions around the world (e.g., the UK Office of Fair Trade) closely monitor complex ownership structures within their national borders. The fact that international data sets as well as methods to handle large networks became available only very recently, may explain how this finding could go unnoticed for so long.
Two issues are worth being addressed here. One may question the idea of putting together data of ownership across countries with diverse legal settings. However, previous empirical work shows that of all possible determinants affecting ownership relations in different countries (e.g., tax rules, level of corruption, institutional settings, etc.), only the level of investor protection is statistically relevant [27]. In any case, it is remarkable that our results on concentration are robust with respect to three very different models used to infer control from ownership. The second issue concerns the control that financial institutions effectively exert. According to some theoretical arguments, in general, financial institutions do not invest in equity shares in order to exert control.
However, there is also empirical evidence of the opposite [23, SI Appendix, Sec. 8.1]. Our results show that, globally, top holders are at least in the position to exert considerable control, either formally (e.g., voting in shareholder and board meetings) or via informal negotiations.
Beyond the relevance of these results for economics and policy making, our methodology can be applied to identify key nodes in any real-world network in which a scalar quantity (e.g., resources or energy) flows along directed weighted links. From an empirical point of view, a bowtie structure with a very small and influential core is a new observation in the study of complex networks. We conjecture that it may be present in other types of networks where “rich-get-richer” mechanisms are at work (although a degree preferential-attachment [1] alone does not produce a bow-tie). [quer dizer, a topologia do novelo feito de remendos denota a eficácia do controle, mas não da riqueza! Daí o aparecimento de um clube de ricos que ficam mais ricos equivaler, abstratamente, à formação desse novelo de remendos rotos, sujeitos ao esgarçamento pelo próprio enredamento permanente (e que as crises manifestam), pois, se efetivamente aquele clube concentra a riqueza produzida, consegue-o através da operação exclusiva dos mecanismos de cômputo, abusando do controle que detem sobre a miséria, explorando-a financeiramente. Em suma, o lucro vem da desestruturação produtiva e do controle dos fluxos, apenas aparentemente desregulamentados, posto que estão bem emendados e emaranhados os remendos dos diferentes setores, das diferentes meadas; o produto global aparece como um só novelo de novelos, tendendo a decrescer se não se emaranha mais e mais em torno de trapos desfeitos e reatados em seu favor.] However, the fact that the core is so densely connected could be seen as a generalization of the “rich-club phenomenon” with control in the role of degree [28, 3, SI Appendix, Sec. 8.2]. These related open issues could be possibly understood by introducing control in a “fitness model” [29] of network evolution.
8.2 Relation to the Rich Club Phenomenon
The so-called rich club phenomenon [20, 21] refers to the fact that in some complex networks the nodes with the highest degree tend to be connected among each other. Being based solely on node degree, rich club indices are not suitable for ownership networks, in which indirect and weighted paths matter. Moreover, in order to benchmark the resulting value of rich club indices, it is usually necessary to reshuffle the links in the network. This would be a problem in our
network because it would lead to economically unviable ownership networks. Notice, however, that the core of the TNC network could be seen as a generalization of the rich club phenomenon with control in the role of degree. Thus, future work should look into this issue more in depth.
8.3 Top Control-Holders Ranking
This is the first time a ranking of economic actors by global control is presented. Notice that many actors belong to the financial sector (NACE codes starting with 65,66,67) and many of the names are well-known global players. The interest of this ranking is not that it exposes unsuspected powerful players. Instead, it shows that many of the top actors belong to the core. This means that they do not carry out their business in isolation but, on the contrary, they
are tied together in an extremely entangled web of control. This finding is extremely important since there was no prior economic theory or empirical evidence regarding whether and how top
players are connected. Finally, it should be noted that governments and natural persons are only featured further down in the list.
32/36S. Vitali, J.B. Glattfelder, and S. Battiston:
The network of global corporate control
Table S1: Top 50 control-holders. Shareholders are ranked by network control (according to the threshold model, TM). Column indicate country, NACE industrial sector code, actor’s position in
the bow-tie sections, cumulative network control. Notice that NACE code starting with 65,66,67 belong to the financial sector.
Rank Economic actor name / Country NACE code / Network Cumul. / network position control (TM, %)
1 BARCLAYS / PLC / GB / 6512 SCC 4.05
2 CAPITAL GROUP COMPANIES INC, THE US 6713 IN 6.66
3 FMR CORP US 6713 IN 8.94
4 AXA FR 6712 SCC 11.21
5 STATE STREET CORPORATION US 6713 SCC 13.02
6 JPMORGAN CHASE & CO. US 6512 SCC 14.55
7 LEGAL & GENERAL GROUP PLC GB 6603 SCC 16.02
8 VANGUARD GROUP, INC., THE US 7415 IN 17.25
9 UBS AG CH 6512 SCC 18.46
10 MERRILL LYNCH & CO., INC. US 6712 SCC 19.45
11 WELLINGTON MANAGEMENT CO. L.L.P. US 6713 IN 20.33
12 DEUTSCHE BANK AG DE 6512 SCC 21.17
13 FRANKLIN RESOURCES, INC. US 6512 SCC 21.99
14 CREDIT SUISSE GROUP CH 6512 SCC 22.81
15 WALTON ENTERPRISES LLC US 2923 T&T 23.56
16 BANK OF NEW YORK MELLON CORP. US 6512 IN 24.28
17 NATIXIS FR 6512 SCC 24.98
18 GOLDMAN SACHS GROUP, INC., THE US 6712 SCC 25.64
19 T. ROWE PRICE GROUP, INC. US 6713 SCC 26.29
20 LEGG MASON, INC. US 6712 SCC 26.92
21 MORGAN STANLEY US 6712 SCC 27.56
22 MITSUBISHI UFJ FINANCIAL GROUP, INC. JP 6512 SCC 28.16
23 NORTHERN TRUST CORPORATION US 6512 SCC 28.72
24 SOCIÉTÉ GÉNÉRALE FR 6512 SCC 29.26
25 BANK OF AMERICA CORPORATION US 6512 SCC 29.79
26 LLOYDS TSB GROUP PLC GB 6512 SCC 30.30
27 INVESCO PLC GB 6523 SCC 30.82
28 ALLIANZ SE DE 7415 SCC 31.32
29 TIAA US 6601 IN 32.24
30 OLD MUTUAL PUBLIC LIMITED COMPANY GB 6601 SCC 32.69
31 AVIVA PLC GB 6601 SCC 33.14
32 SCHRODERS PLC GB 6712 SCC 33.57
33 DODGE & COX US 7415 IN 34.00
34 LEHMAN BROTHERS HOLDINGS, INC. US 6712 SCC 34.43
35 SUN LIFE FINANCIAL, INC. CA 6601 SCC 34.82
36 STANDARD LIFE PLC GB 6601 SCC 35.2
37 CNCE FR 6512 SCC 35.57
38 NOMURA HOLDINGS, INC. JP 6512 SCC 35.92
39 THE DEPOSITORY TRUST COMPANY US 6512 IN 36.28
40 MASSACHUSETTS MUTUAL LIFE INSUR. US 6601 IN 36.63
41 ING GROEP N.V. NL 6603 SCC 36.96
42 BRANDES INVESTMENT PARTNERS, L.P. US 6713 IN 37.29
43 UNICREDITO ITALIANO SPA IT 6512 SCC 37.61
44 DEPOSIT INSURANCE CORPORATION OF JP JP 6511 IN 37.93
45 VERENIGING AEGON NL 6512 IN 38.25
46 BNP PARIBAS FR 6512 SCC 38.56
47 AFFILIATED MANAGERS GROUP, INC. US 6713 SCC 38.88
48 RESONA HOLDINGS, INC. JP 6512 SCC 39.18
49 CAPITAL GROUP INTERNATIONAL, INC. US 7414 IN 39.48
50 CHINA PETROCHEMICAL GROUP CO. CN 6511 T&T 39.7
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Quantitative Finance > General Finance
The network of global corporate control
(Submitted on 28 Jul 2011 (v1), last revised 19 Sep 2011 (this version, v2))
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.
Submission history
From: James Glattfelder B [view email][v1] Thu, 28 Jul 2011 14:57:51 GMT (1668kb)
[v2] Mon, 19 Sep 2011 14:36:01 GMT (1413kb,D)
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