This paper presents new evidence on industry concentration at both the country and the world-region levels. It calculates country-level industry concentration measures from the novel data representative of the entire firm population in 12 European countries, and it develops a methodology for calculating industry concentration at the supranational level using detailed cross-country data on subsidiaries of business groups. This paper documents that industry concentration has increased not only in North America but also in Europe since 2000, albeit to a lesser extent.
Calligaris provided excellent assistance with the metadata and Flavio Calvino with the policy data. A previous version of this document was presented and discussed by the OECD Committee for Industry, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) and its Working Party on Industry Analysis (WPIA).
This report presents new evidence on industry concentration trends in Europe and in North America. It uses two novel data sources: representative firm-level concentration measures from the OECD MultiProd project, and business-group-level concentration measures using matched Orbis-Worldscope-Zephyr data. Based on the MultiProd data, it finds that between 2001 and 2012 the average industry across 10 European economies saw a 2-3-percentage-point increase in the share of the 10% largest companies in industry sales. Using the Orbis-Worldscope-Zephyr data, it documents a clear increase in industry concentration in Europe as well as in North America between 2000 and 2014 of the order of 4-8 percentage points for the average industry. Over the period, about 3 out of 4 (2-digit) industries in each region saw their concentration increase. The increase is observed for both manufacturing and non-financial services and is not driven by digital-intensive sectors.
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