> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Doug Henwood) > How do we know there's been a sharper concentration? How can we *really* know?? Especially if behind almost every big firm there seems to be an intrincate conglomerate of well diversified networks of investors, financial enterprises, conglomerates, and even governments... Yet, I do make my inferences, anyway, based on, say, things I've used here and there:: * 'The Times 1000' (1989/90): "The 500 leading European Companies" (pp.88 ff.) * '1990 Britannica Book of the Year', Encyclopaedia Britannica, Chicago, pp.816 ff. * ECLAC had (and possibly still has) a Data Bank on Direct Foreign Investment in Latin America, will allowed for calculating Gini's. I remember to have used it to make the point that not only MNCs showed a tendency -over the 1980s- to concentrate *at the origin* by building financial-entrepreneurial conglomerates, but also *in destination* by narrowing down into selected countries and industries. There are of course elaborated studies on the same, which I used over the late 1980s and early 1990s. These may focus on financial, industry, or country perspectives; they develop their own argument, but add sufficient statistics: * Devlin(1989): Debt and Crises in Latin America; *Kirpatrick, Lee and Nixson (1985) Industrial Structure and Policy in LDCs.; * also Forbes has quite some stuff on this as well; * Magdoff (1992): 'Globalization - To What End', in Miliband and Panitch (eds): Socialist Register 1992. As you may see, I haven't followed closely the issue over the last four or five years, but still, I happen to find, practically everyday, news about merge and agreements between big firms (banks, telecomunication cias, airlines, computer cias, mining, food industries, etc etc...) all over the world. I "looks like" sharper concentration, to me... Put that together with things as the UN Development reports, Human indicator indexes, or other stuff which tells about concentration of *personal* wealth... If capitalists are getting more and more 'concentrated', it can be related with that *at the origin* the capital is concentrating... But still, I will be happy to change my mind if there is some evidence of the contrary, really. My guess is that, given the current complexity of financial interrelations in the world of today, any *proof*of one point or the other should be taken with care... Salud, Alex Alex Izurieta E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Institute of Social Studies P.O. Box 29776 2502 LT The Hague Tel. 31-70-4260480 Fax. 31-70-4260755
