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Comparing Companies to Nations

Summary:
Asher Schechter raises a good point in How Market Power Leads to Corporate Political Influence but this comparison is troublesome: In 2016, the advocacy group Global Justice Now published a report showing that 69 of the world’s largest 100 economic entities are now corporations, not governments. With annual revenues of 5.9 billion, Walmart topped all but nine countries. GDP is a value-added concept – revenue is not. So what is the right metric? Walmart may have had this much revenue but its pretax income was only .5 billion and its operating income was .8 billion. Profits understate value-added and since Walmart has over 0 billion in operating expenses (think all those workers surviving on an hour), Walmart’s gross profit is likely the right metric to compare to the GDP

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Asher Schechter raises a good point in How Market Power Leads to Corporate Political Influence but this comparison is troublesome:
In 2016, the advocacy group Global Justice Now published a report showing that 69 of the world’s largest 100 economic entities are now corporations, not governments. With annual revenues of $485.9 billion, Walmart topped all but nine countries.
GDP is a value-added concept – revenue is not. So what is the right metric? Walmart may have had this much revenue but its pretax income was only $20.5 billion and its operating income was $22.8 billion. Profits understate value-added and since Walmart has over $100 billion in operating expenses (think all those workers surviving on $9 an hour), Walmart’s gross profit is likely the right metric to compare to the GDP of nations and this figure in 2016 was $124.6 billion. So yea – it is a mega corporation but its value-added does not put it in the top 10 of governments.

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