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	Spread the benefits of cooperation through story-telling by ICA & Euricse Italy   Stories.coop is the world’s first global, digital campaign to spread the benefits of cooperation through story-telling.   Stories.coop delivers the UN’s message “Cooperative enterprises build a better world” to the global public in International Year of Cooperatives 2012.   We want the stories of cooperation from every corner of the globe; from the smallest cooperative to the biggest; from the cooperators with personal stories to tell or the stories of business success; to those with observations on the cooperative model.   We want to demonstrate to the globe the benefits of the cooperative way of doing business, through your story of cooperation.   Stories.coop is a partnership between Euricse, the European Research Institute on Cooperative and Social Enterprises, based in Trento, Italy and the apex organization for cooperatives worldwide, the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA).   Euricse is a research centre focused on cooperative and social enterprises located in Italy and international in scope. Euricse’s mission is to promote knowledge development and innovation for the field of cooperatives, social enterprises and other nonprofit organizations engaged in the production of goods and services. The Institute aims to deepen the understanding of these types of organizations and their impact on economic and social development, furthering their growth and assisting them to work more effectively.   ICA is an independent, non-governmental association which unites, represents and serves co-operatives worldwide. Founded in 1895, ICA has 260 member organisations from 96 countries active in all sectors of the economy. Together these co-operatives represent nearly one billion individuals worldwide. Visit the related web page
	Is the world’s economy run by a small number of companies? by Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich Switzerland   October 2011   Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, have published a paper that argues just 147 companies account for a large share of the total economic value of all the transnational companies around the world. Among the top 50 corporations, 45 operate within the financial industry.   The United States takes home first prize with 24 companies in the researchers’ top 50 list, followed by the U.K. with 8, France with 5, Japan with 4, and Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands tying with 2 companies each.   The research suggests “a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions,” authors Stefania Vitali, James Glattfelder and Stefano Battiston wrote in their study entitled: The network of global corporate control.   “This core can be seen as an economic "super-entity" that raises important issues for policy makers.”   While the authors note that many in the worlds of academia and the media already believe the world’s economy is run by a small number of companies, there was no actual data to back it up. So they set out to study the elaborate ownership structures of 43,060 transnational companies, eventually uncovering more than one million ownership ties within that network.   The authors believe this level of control among a small number of players has a significant impact on the world’s economic health. The 147 companies in the “core” control 40 per cent of the total economic value of all transnational corporations.   “The top ranked actors hold a control ten times bigger than what could be expected based on their wealth,” the authors noted.   The intense interconnection and concentration of power weakens market competition as players form blocs, according to the study. There’s another drawback to those close links, particularly among the banks: when one runs into problems its woes spread quickly to the others.   * Visit the link below for more details. Visit the related web page
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