Who Runs the World? The "Super Entity."
The first analysis of the "Super Entity" has been conducted in very careful detail (links below the divide). The "Entity" consists of the "Global 147."
This looks like space stuff, doesn't it?
But, nope, it's the "Super Entity" of TransNational Corporations.
In the analysis, the authors (Vitali, Glattfelder, Battiston) lay out the "architecture" of the global ownership network:
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.
Previous attempts to analyze the Super-Entity were limited in scope to national networks which "neglected the structure of control at a global level." What was needed was a complex network analysis: thus, the "bow-tie" structure was used because it is similar to the structure used in analyzing the most influential/trafficked websites.
They began with a list of 43,060 TNC's (transnational corporations) from the Orbis 2007 database (which is why some on the list are now defunct). They then used a recursive search algorithm and here's a partial result:
The above list consists of the Top 50 control holders of the Super-Entity. It is easier to read in the paper (linked below).
Per the authors:
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.
The study shows that network control is much more unequally distributed than wealth, meaning that the top ranked actors hold a control ten times bigger than what could be expected based on their wealth.
Two generalized characteristics were identified: each member firm owns directly or indirectly shares in every other member; and the largest connection contains only one strongly connected component, the core. This leads to the emergence of a structure which prevents take-overs, reduces transaction costs, includes risk-sharing and increases trust between groups of interest.
In summary:
1. Nearly 4/10 of the control over the economic value of transnational corporations in the world is held, via a complicated web of ownership relations, by a group of 147 transnational corporations in the core;
2. About 3/4 of the ownership of firms in the core remains in the hands of firms of the core itself - cumulatively they hold the majority share of each other and so the core has almost full control over itself;
3. Almost 3/4 of the core is made up of financial intermediaries;
4. When a financial network is very densely connected, it is prone to systemic risk.
Knowledge is power. To my mind, we can accept that the Super Entity controls the world and learn to live with the fact that it truly is too big to fail or we can chip away at its weakness and work to help it implode.
Here is a link to the super cool article which I hope you'll read: "Super-Entity" Article
Here is a link to the super complex paper: The network of global corporate control
Here is a link to the portion of the Cornell University Library where the paper resides: http://arxiv.org/...