Nicholas Freudenberg
How does the size of governments and corporations compare? To answer this question, I identified one metric often used to measure the size of organizations: annual revenues. I then found a source for annual revenues for governments, The CIA World Fact Book and another for corporations, The Global Fortune 500 List. Both provided data for 2014. The results below show that of the 100 governments and corporations with the highest annual revenues in 2014, 63 are corporations and 37 are governments. Previous analysts have compared corporations to national economies, a different measure. In 2000, Anderson and Cavanagh found that of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 were global corporations and 49 were countries. In 2012, the economic analyst D. Steven White listed the top 175 “economic entities” in the world for 2011, using GDP for nations and revenues for corporations. Of these, 63% were corporations and 37% were nations.
Corporations and Health Watch 