One hundred and forty-seven companies, mostly banks, hold commercial relations around the world. The data is disclosed in a report on the Época Negócios portal, based on a study carried out by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, based in Zurich.

According to Época Negócios, the research methodology began with the analysis of 43 thousand transnational companies and applied mathematical concepts to map which companies have ownership over others around the world. One of the points of analysis was Orbis 2007, a database that lists 37 million companies and investors and made it possible to reach a number of 43,060 transnational companies and the properties shared between them.

Based on this data, a model was built that showed which companies controlled others through share ownership networks and cross-referenced the operating revenues of each company, as narrated in the report. In this way, it was possible to map the economic power structure of each of them. As Época Negócios.Com points out, by crossing the ownership data, the group responsible for the study ended up finding a “super entity” of 147 companies, all of which owned each other.

Evaluating the results of the study, economists interviewed by the Época Negócios report avoid analyzing the situation from the perspective of conspiracy. Although the result demonstrates concentration of economic power, experts understand that transnational companies buy shares from each other for business reasons and not to dominate the world, as the article points out.

With information from the Época Negócios Portal