Two of the biggest business trends in the past few years have been record amounts of labour action and a rise in antitrust cases. This year alone, for example, America has recorded the most working days missed due to strikes in almost a quarter of a century, and has also seen the most aggressive anti-monopoly action in decades. Both of these trends, which are also present in Europe and elsewhere, are a reaction to decades of corporate consolidation and record profits.While it once seemed that rising wage inflation and a pandemic-era trend towards supply chain de-risking would start to erode corporate power, the latest UN Trade and Development Report shows that hasn’t happened yet. In fact, both consolidation and profits increased dramatically during Covid-19, with worrisome repercussions including price gouging and food insecurity.
If concentration is a concern in the rich world, it is even more of one in poorer nations. High levels of export concentration among the largest 2,000 firms globally increased during the pandemic. This was particularly true in developing countries, where data shows that the top 1 per cent of exporting businesses within each country received between 40 and 90 per cent of total export revenues for the nation as a whole. The median rate of corporate export concentration in a database of 30 developing countries is a whopping 40 per cent.
The authors of the Unctad report note that this increase during the pandemic raises “concerns about market control and the distribution of the gains from trade” in countries that were previously counting on trade expansion to put more people in work.