Business Concentration around the World: 1900-2020

We collect new data to document the long-run evolution of the firm size distribution in ten market-based economies in Asia, Europe, North America, and Oceania, where we can obtain comprehensive coverage of the population of firms. Around the world, we observe prevalent increases in the concentration of sales, net income, and equity capital over the past century. These trends hold in the aggregate and at the industry level. Meanwhile, employment concentration has been stable over the long run in most cases. The evidence shows that the rising dominance of large firms is a pervasive phenomenon, not limited to the recent decades or the United States, and that large firms often achieve greater scale without proportionally more workers.