multinationals
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Multinational corporations are increasingly seen as excessively big and powerful, and as having dramatically increased in size and power. This perception has led to the view that the big corporations are threatening democratic institutions of the nation-states and that they pervert the cultural and social fabric of countries. In this paper we analyse the size of large corporations and the recent trends in this size. Using value-added data (instead of sales) we find that multinationals are surprisingly small compared to the GDP of many nation-states. In addition, if anything, the size of multinationals relative to the size of nations has tended to decline somewhat during the last 20 years. Finally, we argue that there is little evidence that the economic and political power of multinationals has increased in the last few decades.
Multinationals are out of favour. This is not the first time. During the 1960s and the 1970s multinational companies, especially the American variety, were seen as institutions increasingly bent on dominating the world. It was the time of the best-selling "The American Challenge" of Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, which became very influential in Europe, and which argued that thanks to sophisticated management methods, large American enterprises would take over Europe and the world...