The Largest Trans-Nationals of Developing Economies

Industrial concentration is broadly defined as a few firms controlling a substantial share of assets or sales of the market. In the multinational industrial sector, this paper shows that the largest 50 and 100 in the developing economies control substantial amounts of assets and sales, both foreign and total. Two well known indexes of concentration were used, the Herfindahl and Theil’s entropy, to check the levels of concentration between 1994 and 2003 for the top 50 and between 2004 and 2006 for the top 100. It was found that though the sizes of the multinationals in assets and sales increased during the period, the relative concentration remained somewhat static.