From: Paul Adler (padler@USC.EDU)
Date: Thu Feb 16 2006 - 11:09:21 EST
Thx Jurriaan. Your understanding is, I think, close to my own. Jerry poses some interesting alternatives though: I wonder what you make of them. Regarding the empirical data: (a) even on your/my construal, it's not entirel obvious what indicators fit the concept of centralization most adequately, and (b) I have had difficulty going back much further than mid-century. I'm trying to dig up corresponding figures for 1900 for the US. Paul At 4:56 PM +0100 2/16/06, Jurriaan Bendien wrote: >Marx's interpretation seems to be that "centralization" refers to the >effective ownership of productive assets in fewer hands (legal structure), >principally through the joint-stock system, while "concentration" refers to >the scale of production (physical plant size, or the amount of capital set >in motion in production). > >So, if more and more enterprises are owned/controlled by the same >institutional entity or people, that would be "centralisation". If a few >large-scale enterprises substitute for many small-size enterprises, that >would be "concentration". Marx discusses in many passages how the one might >influence the other, but admittedly he sometimes uses "concentration" also >to refer to "centralisation" which is somewhat confusing. > >There are many studies of the pattern of ownership and control of companies, >and, in official statistics, establishments are often ranked by the number >of workers employed. Rankings of the largest corporations globally are >provided by Forbes Magazine, Fortune Magazine and Business Review Weekly, >among others. > >As regards the Fortune Global 500 largest corporations in 2003 (I don't have >the most recent data handy), they were >said to have issued share-capital worth about US$6.8 trillion and together >owned assets worth US$60.8 trillion. (Source: Fortune Vol. 150, No. 2, >Europe edition 13, July-August 2004, p. F-10). Banks, finance and insurance >companies are strongly represented in the list, and a number of them have >assets close to or larger than $1 trillion (e.g. Citigroup, ING, Deutsche >Bank, Mizuho, Mitsubishi). One trillion dollars is approximately equal to >the GDP of Mexico, Spain or Canada (world GDP is currently valued at about >40 trillion dollars). > >According to the Merrill-Lynch report on "high net worth individuals", those >owning US$1 million or more in 2004 owned $30.8 trillion worth of assets. > >Here in Holland, a country of 16.3 million people and a workforce of 7 >million, there are about 102,600 people owning a million dollars or more, >and together they own about $310 billion of assets. Out of about 717,000 >Dutch enterprises, about half are one-person enterprises, and about 1,300 >enterprises have a workforce of 500 employees or more (6,595 enterprises >have more than 100 employees each). The top 10 Dutch corporations employ >about 1.5 million people worldwide; the top 40 corporations in Holland have >a number of employees equal to about 1/3 of the total Dutch workforce. > >Jurriaan
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Feb 17 2006 - 00:00:02 EST