کسب و کار بزرگ و رشد اقتصادی: شناسایی محدودیت اتصال برای رشد با تجزیه و تحلیل پانل کشور

A large body of qualitative studies on the positive role played by big businesses in promoting economic growth is widely available. However, any rigorous attempt to measure this impact has yet to be made. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap by utilizing new and internationally comparable databases such as those of the Global Fortune 500, the Business Week 1000, and the Forbes 2000 publications, and by using rigorous quantitative methods. We measure big businesses by both the number of these firms and by their sales volumes in each country. The empirical results of all models consistently show four major patterns. First, big businesses have a significant and positive effect on economic growth. Second, such businesses in each nation are positively associated with stability in economic growth. Third, the significant and positive effect of big businesses on economic growth remains even with the inclusion in the estimations of the share of SME employment and the control for possible endogeneity in big businesses and SMEs. Fourth, in considering both the absolute and the relative presence of big businesses within each country, their absolute presence is positively linked to economic growth, whereas the relative presence of big businesses within the national economy is negatively linked to economic growth.

Big businesses are not only producers of popular products but also important players in the economy. The emergence of big businesses originated in the United States (US) by the end of the 19th century, spreading later to some European countries such as Germany and France as well as to Japan. More recently, a number of newly industrialized countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, China, and Brazil have also become locations for the headquarters of big businesses. As Chandler, 1959, Chandler, 1977 and Chandler, 1990 and his contemporaries (Chandler et al., 1997) argued, industrial take-off and rapid economic growth in all these industrialized nations have been accompanied by the appearance and flourishing of big businesses. Is this scenario a coincidence? If not, what is the logical nexus? The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role and significance of big businesses in economic development. The importance of this question is confirmed by the ample attention that economists and other social scientists have been giving to the role of big businesses in national economies (Schumpeter, 1934, Schumpeter, 1942, Kozul-Wright and Rowthorn, 1998, Pagano and Schivardi, 2003, Blackford, 1998, Cassis, 1997, Wardley, 1991 and Fogel et al., 2008). The literature on the determinants of economic growth and development is massive, and many factors or variables have been suggested theoretically and empirically. For example, Acemoglu et al., 2001, Acemoglu et al., 2002, Rodrik et al., 2004 and Rodrik, 1999, and Glaeser et al. (2004) analyzed factors such as the economic role of institutions, policies, domestic social conflicts, or geography. The purpose of the present study is not to enumerate and review the literature but to highlight some new directions. In response to the World Bank’s (2005) review of the economic growth experience around the globe in the 1990s, Rodrik (2006) emphasized the importance of identifying the “binding constraints” on growth. According to Rodrik, the most urgent task for economists is to undertake a diagnostic analysis to detect where the most significant constraints on economic growth are (and hence where the greatest return is). We follow Rodrik’s emphasis on “finding the binding constraints” as we examine the role of big businesses in economic growth.1 We claim that having or not having a certain number of big businesses is one of the important binding constraints that various nations are facing in their recent economic development, especially in countries that are presently in the so-called middle-income trap (World Bank, 2010 and Yusuf and Nabeshima, 2009).2 Whereas Hausmann et al. (2008) diagnosed specific binding constraints for each specific country, we think that such constraints can also be identified for groups of countries. One of the crucial differences between high- and middle-income countries might be that the latter lack the big businesses that can compete globally. We investigate the specific role of big businesses after controlling for usual variables in growth modeling such as capital, education, technology and small and medium enterprises (SMEs). In other words, we hypothesize that ignoring the significant role of big businesses in economic growth is similar to ignoring other “economic distortions whose removal would make the largest contribution to alleviating the constraints on growth …” (Hausmann et al., 2008, p. 331). This approach is also aligned with that by Lee and Kim (2009), who claimed that some factors are more important or more binding, depending on the stage of economic development. In the next section, we present the theoretical case for analyzing the contribution of big businesses to economic growth and contrast their role with that played by SMEs. We then gather systematic, empirical evidence on the roles that big businesses play for a large group of middle- and high-income countries. To the best of our knowledge, this approach to gathering and applying empirical evidence has not been carried out before in a rigorous and systematic way. Our empirical investigation uses internationally comparable data on big businesses for a range of relevant countries. The three main databases this paper draws on are the Fortune 500, Business Week 1000, and the Forbes 2000 surveys of the largest companies in the world. We apply panel data econometric techniques such as fixed effects (FE) and generalized method of moments (GMM). These techniques are necessary to control for endogeneity or two-way causality, because a priori, we cannot be certain whether big businesses cause national growth, or whether national growth causes big businesses to expand. We test a set of related hypotheses, which are as follows: (i) big businesses (represented by either their numbers or by their sales volumes) significantly contribute to a country’s per capita GDP growth; (ii) big businesses contribute to GDP stability; (iii) big businesses contribute to economic growth in a more robust and definite way than SMEs; and (iv) excessive reliance on big businesses hinders economic growth. In other words, we can verify that increases in the relative predominance of big businesses in a nation’s economy have negative implications for growth despite the positive link of expansion in the absolute size and number of big businesses to national growth and GDP stability. Such verification can be achieved by examining the effect of both the absolute and the relative presence of big businesses in each country. All the hypotheses are discussed in our theoretical considerations in the next section. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses several theoretical issues on the role of big businesses in economic growth. Section 3 explains the methodology of our analysis. Section 4 presents the data and variables. Section 5 discusses the main findings from the empirical investigation. Section 6 checks the robustness of our results with the use of additional control variables and deals with the issues of sample selection bias. This section also looks at the effect of SMEs compared with that of big businesses. Section 7 extends our discussion by focusing on the contribution of big businesses in stabilizing growth, and on the issues surrounding the absolute and relative presence of big businesses in a national economy. In Section 8, we present our conclusions and final remarks.

The role of big businesses in economic growth has four interdependent aspects: (i) big businesses significantly contribute to per capita GDP growth, (ii) big businesses contribute to GDP stability, (iii) big businesses exert a more definite and robust effect on economic growth than SMEs, and (iv) too much reliance on big businesses in a country might not be beneficial to overall economic growth. A few scholars (e.g., Chandler, Schumpeter, and so on) have made this observation, but not as many as those who have highlighted the importance of each of the four aspects. More important, we believe no rigorous attempt has been made thus far to measure this fourfold effect. Our study attempts to fill this gap by using three databases and applying rigorous quantitative methods. The empirical results from all of our models consistently show that big firms exert a significant positive and stabilizing effect on economic growth. The positive coefficients on Fortune firms are obtained with either the number or sales volume of big businesses, regardless of whether USA and Japan are included or excluded from the sample. A significant stabilizing effect was detected when we examined the standard deviation of GDP per capita growth as the dependent variable. This finding is important in itself because it shows that big businesses can exert a positive role in the economy: they do so not only directly but also through moderation of growth fluctuation. When we include the share of SME employment as a regressor in our estimations, the role of big businesses retain its positive and significant effect, whereas the SME variable becomes insignificant or negative. We also find a negative coefficient of the variable of relative presence of big businesses as a percentage of GDP. This result implies that increasing the market dominance of big businesses is not constructive for the economy, although the magnitude of this negative effect is rather small. In addition, we find that successful late-comer economies tend to show a common pattern of movement from a lower presence of big businesses in both relative and absolute measures, to a higher presence in both absolute and relative terms. This contrasts with the case of slowly growing late-comer economies that tend to be stuck with a low presence of big businesses. Finally, we did not find any selection biases. Our sample countries are mostly upper-middle or high-income per capita countries. Therefore, big businesses matter not for every country but for this particular group of countries. This interpretation is consistent with the finding of Lee and Kim (2009) that technological development and higher education are effective in generating growth for upper-middle and high-income countries. Together with Lee and Kim’s findings, the results of this study contribute to the literature because another binding constraint for economic growth is identified, particularly for middle-income countries. Our research is not without limitations. First, we deal with large firms at the world-class level only. The role of smaller but still big firms at national or international levels, the hidden champion of Germany’s Mittelstand (Simon, 2009) or Italy’s fourth capitalism (Colli, 2002), may be equally important and is possibly different from that of large firms. Second, the role and the importance of big businesses may have changed over time. Although we note their increasing importance in national economies from the mid-1990s to the 2000s, some studies have noted that their shares of GDP were declining in the 1970s and 1980s. Therefore, we still know little about the long-term evolution of big firms. Third, we do not consider the details of the interaction between big businesses and SMEs. The relationship between these two types of firms is complicated and should receive further attention in the future. Addressing all of these limitations can be a direction of future research. Despite these limitations, our findings provide useful policy insights into the role of big businesses in economic growth. Economic development generally depends on firms of all sizes in a given nation. Nonetheless, the findings suggest that big businesses and not SMEs exert an independent and robust effect on economic growth. At the same time, the results also warn against the negative effects of excessive relative dependence on big businesses. Subsequently, the study implies that the best scenario is to adopt both a growing number of world-class big businesses and a rising number of SMEs. SMEs are important especially in job creation; although they may not be the main triggering force for growth, they tend to benefit from economic growth triggered by big businesses. Large businesses have a global presence in many countries because they often conduct FDI in several nations. Many studies have examined the effect of FDI, or the location of production in overseas countries, by big businesses. By classifying big businesses according to the locations of their headquarters, this study verifies the importance of big business headquarters in their host nations. The finding on corporate headquarters is consistent with the inference that big businesses are important not only because they conduct high-end goods production in their home countries but also because they conduct R&D and marketing there. Therefore, big businesses are the firms that generate innovations and can thus engender “rents” or extra profits to support high levels of income. This finding is consistent with Schumpeter’s original insights (1934, 1942) into the role of big businesses in innovation. However, a concern is that if big businesses dominate the markets in which they operate, they will not use their extra profits for R&D but rather become complacent. Our analysis shows that such concern is legitimate. In other words, having more big businesses is beneficial as long as this does not lead to less competitive market structures or to the stifled growth of small firms. With the above conclusions and clarifications on the role of big businesses in national economies, policy makers in the developing world, who have thus far given considerable attention on SMEs, should now acknowledge the importance of big businesses. Large, emerging economies may particularly face relative stagnation and fall into a middle-income country trap without reaching the status of high-income countries.