Felix Dodds comments on sustainable development, coffee & life

Guest Blog:  Allen White is vice president and senior fellow at Tellus Institute and directs the institute’s Program on Corporate Redesign. Is the post-war ascendance of multinational corporations irreversible? The world’s roughly 80,000 multinational corporations (MNCs), long dominated by U.S., European and Japanese firms, have been joined by a growing number based in China, India, Brazil and other emerging economies. MNCs are the engine of a quarter of total world production and their global supply chains represent about half of world trade. MNCs have played a major role in driving a tenfold increase since 1979, now totaling $16 trillion, roughly the size of entire U.S. GDP. Amidst this rapid expansion is a concurrent concentration in market power. The world's 1,000 largest companies in 1980 represented about 30 percent of the GDP of the OECD countries. By 2010, that figure rose to 72 percent. Pressures to consolidate among technology, pharmaceuticals, airlines an...