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that form the core of the economy. Super-connected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue
As protesters against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears.
An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.
The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy.
Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.
The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere.
But the study (The Network of Global Corporate Control), by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power.
It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).
Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.
The Zurich team can...
From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them.
Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.
The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships. 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.
Most were financial institutions.
The top 20 included,
John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.
Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be.
As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable.
Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true.
Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behavior, he says, requires more analysis.
Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy.
James Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs.
Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution:
One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims:
Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members.
TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination.
If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI:
The Zurich study, says Sugihara,
Or as Braha puts it:
So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy.
The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion.
Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.
When this article was first posted, the comment in the final sentence of the paragraph beginning,
The top 50 of the 147 super-connected companies
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