ICC Advance Access originally published online on August 1, 2006
Industrial and Corporate Change 2006 15(4):595-623; doi:10.1093/icc/dtl013
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Global integration
global concentration
Correspondence: Pankaj Ghemawat, Harvard Business School, Soldiers Field Road, Boston MA 02163, USA. e-mail: pghemawat{at}hbs.edu, and IESE Business School, Avenida Pearson 21, Barcelona 08034, Spain. email: pghemawat{at}iese.edu.
Correspondence: Fariborz Ghadar, Penn State University, 429 Beam Business Administration Building, Center for Global Business Studies, University Park, PA 16802, USA. e-mail: fghadar{at}psu.edu.
There is a widespread belief that increases in the cross-border integration of markets are associated with increases in global concentration along various dimensions. This article reviews the available evidence and presents new data, indicating that increasing global integration has not been accompanied by general increases in four types of global concentration measures: industry seller concentration, cross-industry superconcentration, national/regional hegemony, and geographic concentration. The article also uses the automobile industry to illustrate a bias toward believing concentration is increasing even when it is not and to discuss possible reasons.