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Concentration of network control and operating revenue. Economic actors (TNCs and shareholders) are sorted by descending importance, as given by . A data point located at () corresponds to a fraction of top economic actors cumulatively holding the fraction of network control, value or operating revenue. The different curves refer to network control computed with three models (LM, TM, RM), see Appendix S1, Section 3.1, and operating revenue. The horizontal line denotes a value of equal to . The level of concentration is determined by the value of the intersection between each curve and the horizontal line. The scale is semi-log.
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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...
Citations
... At the same time, the entire set of trajectories of the developing system will tend to this steady state, or structure. "Strange attractor" -the Lorentz attractor is most characteristic of self-organizing systems [1,6,20,21]. Such attractors have a prognostic horizon or a corridor with a period of prediction of system behavior. ...
Modern civilization is developing in a period of constant transformations and complication of existing socio-economic conditions. The concept of “singular vertical”, "complex system" or "complex structure", “non-linearity” is increasingly used to characterize the contemporary phenomenon. The large-scale, sweeping and rapid changes occurring in the socio-cultural sphere, in the all kinds of environment, revolution changes in technical and technological development predetermine the need for the ability not only to adapt to above changing conditions, but also to manage these changes. It is obvious that it is possible to analyses the state, determine the problems and directions of development, bifurcation points for a complex system on the basis of a transdisciplinary approach, complexity theory and synergetic, project management as base of modern education’s system. In the conditions of singularity and increased frequency of crises and crisis situations, the modern paradigm of education can have a significant impact on the quality and speed of decision-making in rapidly changing conditions. Since management is an information process, the speed and quality of management decision-making in crisis conditions will depend on the development of systemic and non-linear thinking during education. Managers with such qualities can solve complex problems of stability and resilience in non-standard crisis conditions.
... For example, the transdisciplinary approach in management as a basis for countering the crisis can be traced on the example of the activities of TNCs. The analysis of the activity of TNCs shows that they are less affected by the crisis than any other integrated hierarchical structures, they increase the pace of production the fastest even in crisis conditions, they increase the innovative level of production at the fastest pace and have a high level of financial stability (Vitali et al., 2011). All signs of self-organization and self-harmonization are present. ...
... The study was started with a list of 43,060 TNCs, the resulting TNC network includes 600,508 nodes and 1,006,987 ownership links. The network consists of many small connected components, but at most 3/4 of all nodes contain the leading TNCs with an economic value that accounts for 94.2% of the revenue from the total number of operating TNCs (Vitali et al., 2011). ...
The most important issue of economic development is the question of the real reasons for the growth of labor productivity based on innovative equipment and technologies or “closing technologies”, both directly and in the sphere of organization and management of economic systems. Organizational innovations can also be classified as “closing technologies”. For example, the creation of strategic institution, alliances and associations capable of changing the situation in the global economy, likely World Bank (WB), World Health Organization (WHO), International association Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa (BRICS) etc. This approach involves the formation of fundamental innovative solutions at all levels of the management hierarchy. The imperfection of the existing ideological and methodological paradigm, ignoring the mathematical constants of the Universe when designing economic supersystems or economic systems as integral distributed systems with complex dynamics similar to natural systems, the inefficiency of institutional intervention is the main reason for the impossibility of minimizing the structural and functional instability of the state economic system. The consequence of this is systemic violations and disproportions in the economy, risks associated with changes in the structure of the world economy and a colossal difference in the level of economic security of states and the phenomenon of crisis transfer.
... Our model is grounded in the influential work of Eisenberg and Noe (2001) in which firms are nodes that are connected via debt contracts, with proportional payments in the case of insolvency. Subsequent work extended the basic model, incorporating features such as default costs (Rogers & Veraart, 2013), cross-ownership relations (Elliott, Golub, & Jackson, 2014;Vitali, Glattfelder, & Battiston, 2011), liabilities with various maturities (Allouch, Jalloul, & Duncan, 2023;Kusnetsov & Veraart, 2019), and credit default swaps (Schuldenzucker, Seuken, & Battiston, 2020;Papp & Wattenhofer, 2020). Rogers and Veraart (2013) prove the existence of maximal clearing payments in the presence of default costs and provide an efficient algorithm to compute them. ...
In financial credit networks, prepayments enable a firm to settle its debt obligations ahead of an agreed-upon due date. Prepayments have a transformative impact on the structure of networks, influencing the financial well-being (utility) of individual firms. This study investigates prepayments from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. We first establish the computational complexity of finding prepayments that maximize welfare, assuming global coordination among firms in the financial network. Subsequently, our focus shifts to understanding the strategic behavior of individual firms in the presence of prepayments. We introduce a prepayment game where firms strategically make prepayments, delineating the existence of pure strategy Nash equilibria and analyzing the price of anarchy (stability) within this game. Recognizing the computational challenges associated with determining Nash equilibria in prepayment games, we use a simulation-based approach, known as empirical game-theoretic analysis (EGTA). Through EGTA, we are able to find Nash equilibria among a carefully-chosen set of heuristic strategies. By examining the equilibrium behavior of firms, we outline the characteristics of high-performing strategies for strategic prepayments and establish connections between our empirical and theoretical findings.
... Lorenz [16] studied "Nonlinear Dynamical Economics and its attractor". Vitali et al. [17] studied "Lorenz attractor in diagnostic of dynamic stability of open complex system -example of biggest TNK". ...
The main purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of project management and partnership banking. Due to the shortage of investment, Ukraine always needs to plan for financial resources. All over the world, partnership banking is becoming an increasingly common and attractive type of investment in projects. In the conditions of modern Ukraine, with the need to restore industrial and infrastructure construction projects, one can predict significant growth in the construction services market and the need for investment. In this study, the ways of possible increasing investment in the construction industry have been discussed based on the use of a logical-structural approach in project management and partnership banking as a source of investment.
... This work was contingent upon the quality and comprehensiveness of secondary data sources. Orbis is considered "the most comprehensive commercially available company-level global database" [108], and is widely used by researchers for ownership analysis (e.g., [108][109][110][111][112]) including in the seafood industry [16]. In Orbis, ownership relationships are collected through the Ministry of Commerce in jurisdictions where ownership disclosure is mandatory, or otherwise from associated data providers, or directly from the companies themselves [80]. ...
Distant-water fishing (DWF) refers to fishing operations conducted by companies in waters beyond their national exclusive economic zones (EEZs), often targeting the EEZs of other coastal states or international waters. Research on DWF typically emphasizes the flag states of vessels, rather than the nationalities of the corporations that own them, despite evidence of efforts to obscure ownership. This paper examines the corporate owners of 1648 industrial and semi-industrial tuna fishing vessels in the Eastern Pacific Ocean (EPO) using Orbis data, analyzing ownership at three levels: flag state, direct corporate owners, and ultimate corporate owners. Results show that flag state data alone understate the true fishing capacity of key DWF nations. Shifts in ownership nationality across levels are significant, notably for Taiwanese and Spanish corporations owning vessels through proxies in the Global South. These ownership shifts impact 6 % of vessels and 14 % of gross tonnage in the registered EPO tuna fleet. Furthermore, spatial analysis using Global Fishing Watch data highlights the Galapagos Islands EEZ as a critical fishing zone, frequently accessed by foreign fishing corporations through Ecuadorian intermediaries. This study underscores the need to incorporate ownership data into fisheries governance for greater transparency and accountability. The systematic collection and analysis of ownership data would allow fisheries managers to better monitor capacity, address power concentration, and promote policies that ensure fairer distribution of resources and benefits.
... The high degree of transnational concentration can be seen in two key research projects. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology did a massive study of TNCS and found a core group of 147 financial institutes with 47,819 investors from 190 countries hold power in the world's largest transnational corporations (TNCs) (Vitali, Glattfelder, & Battiston, 2011). Another research project by Crux of Capitalism tracked 40,000 publicly-listed firms located in 21 countries and found they accounted for more than 84 percent of global FDI flows from 2018 to 2022 (Evenett, Erencin, & Reitz, 2024). ...
The nature of imperialism has changed over the past 45 years of globalization. The global capitalist system still retains important aspects of state-centric politics and the Western hierarchy but the vast integration of transnational finance and networked production has reshaped relationships and links the big bourgeoise of all countries. The contradictions between the older imperialist system of states, first articulated by Lenin and others of his generation, and contemporary forms of neoliberal domination has created a complex situation of contending forces and influence. The article explores these questions by examining the US/China relationship, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The nature of imperialism has changed over the past 45 years of globalization. The global capitalist system still retains important aspects of state-centric politics and the Western hierarchy but the vast integration of transnational finance and networked production has reshaped relationships and links the big bourgeoise of all countries. The contradictions between the older imperialist system of states, first articulated by Lenin and others of his generation, and contemporary forms of neoliberal domination has created a complex situation of contending forces and influence. The article explores these questions by examining the US/China relationship, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
... Data on production plants' type, geolocation, and capacity are often either missing or fragmented, despite recent progress in spatial finance (https://www.cgfi.ac.uk/spatialfinance-initiative/) 17 . Furthermore, plants' owners identity is not standardised, limiting researchers' ability to reconstruct the ownership chains from plants to firms and investors, due to the complexity of the global ownership network 18,19 . Here, we provide a procedure that leverages existing plant data and cross-matches owners' identity in the main existing datasets. ...
Climate physical risk assessment is crucial to inform adaptation policies and finance. However, science-based and transparent solutions to assess climate physical risks are limited, compounding the adaptation gap. This is a main limitation to fill the adaptation gap. We provide a methodology that quantifies physical risks on geolocalized productive assets, considering their exposure to chronic and acute impacts (hurricanes) across the scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Then, we translate asset-level shocks into economic and financial losses. We apply the methodology to Mexico, a country highly exposed to physical risks, recipient of adaptation finance and foreign investments. We show that investor losses are underestimated up to 70% when neglecting asset-level information, and up to 82% when neglecting tail acute risks. Therefore, neglecting the asset-level and acute dimensions of physical risks leads to large errors in the identification of adaptation policy responses, investments and finance tools aimed to build resilience to climate change.
... An obvious hurdle to this aim is considering all possible contagions channels trough which an impacted agent can affect the other agents in the network. Agents can be connected through direct exposures, but also through complex indirect linkages, such as ownership relationships, when agents own each others' shares [42], and derivative contracts [43,44]. Another issue refers to the different strategies that can be adopted by distressed agents. ...
The concepts and dynamic processes related to complex financial networks (CFNs) are explored in this review article. After providing a definition of CFN, we discuss the most important dynamic process associated with them, i.e. contagion. We then examine the relationship between interconnectedness and systemic risk in CFNs. Next, we discuss approaches to the measurement of systemic risk and the challenges associated with this task. Finally, we conclude by considering some of the issues involved.
... Their research led them to explore k-core decomposition, an iterative process that segregates nodes based on their minimum degrees [29,30]. A node's coreness, indicating its rank in the decomposition hierarchy, is directly tied to its capacity to influence network dynamics [31]. In contrast to coreness, the H-index is a local centrality measure that utilizes only partial information, specifically the degrees of the neighbors of the nodes [32]. ...
Identifying influential actors within social networks is pivotal for optimizing information flow and mitigating the spread of both rumors and viruses. Several methods have emerged to pinpoint these influential entities in networks, represented as graphs. In these graphs, nodes correspond to individuals and edges indicate their connections. This study focuses on centrality measures, prized for their straightforwardness and effectiveness. We divide structural centrality into two categories: local, considering a node’s immediate vicinity, and global, accounting for overarching path structures. Some techniques blend both centralities to highlight nodes influential at both micro and macro levels. Our paper presents a novel centrality measure, accentuating node degree and incorporating the network’s broader features, especially paths of different lengths. Through Spearman and Pearson correlations tested on seven standard datasets, our method proves its merit against traditional centrality measures. Additionally, we employ the susceptible–infected–recovered (SIR) model, portraying virus spread, to further validate our approach. The ultimate influential node is gauged by its capacity to infect the most nodes during the SIR model’s progression. Our results indicate a notable correlative efficacy across various real-world networks relative to other centrality metrics.
... Marx's general law of accumulation of capital is that, over time, capital as represented as the stock of fixed assets owned by capitalists Mohun 2016, 358 191819291945197319792012 One study shows how far that has gone in the recent period. Three systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Vitali et al. 2011) developed a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide and analysed all 43,060 transnational corporations and share ownerships linking them. They built a model of who owns what and what their revenues are, mapping out the whole edifice of economic power. ...
Inequality takes many forms, but it starts with inequality of wealth and incomes. From that flows inequality is social mobility, life expectancy, educational attainment and even happiness. And the inequality of wealth and income is very extreme – both withing countries and between rich and poor countries. The gaps are hardly narrowing, if at all. Behind extreme inequality is the concentration of the bulk of wealth in the form of the ownership of productive capital in just a few adults in the world – no more 1% of 8bn people. That concentration has arisen because of the economic structure of the capitalist mode of production as it has spread across the world in the last century. While that basic structure remains in place, redistribution policies for income and wealth will be inadequate. A fundamental change in the social and economic formation of modern economies is required.
