The Centers of Economic Power. Map by Jordan Engel. Research by Vitali et al.
In 2011, in the midst of the global Occupy movement, researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich became the first the empirically identify the concentrations of global economic power. From a database of 37 million companies and investors, the researchers mapped out the share-ownerships linking them, revealing a network of connections that concentrated control in just 147 tightly-knit transnational corporations.
Illustration of the network of global corporate control. By Vitali et al.
The study showed how network control is much more unequally distributed than wealth. In particular, the top ranked actors hold a control ten times bigger than what could be expected based on their wealth. James Glattfelder, one of the authors of the study, explains that, “In effect, less than 1 percent of the companies were able to control 40 percent…
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