State-owned multinational companies and contemporary capitalism.
Intergovernmental organizations, such as the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development – UNCTAD, or private institutions that carry out research, such as Forbes magazine, have demonstrated the great relevance of state-owned multinational companies in the world economy. They are not only among the largest companies in the world, but they operate in a large number of sectors, employ millions of workers and several of them have a high capacity for financing. Although the number of these companies varies from country to country, there are signs that this importance in global terms has grown in the last period. This is due not only to the increase in the number of headquarters, a result of the high injection of resources from their home states, but also to the significant number of subsidiaries present across the globe. Although there are several reasons why this growth is taking place, there is one aspect that arouses special interest: state-owned multinational companies grew in a period of neoliberal hegemony, even in the most important capitalist countries. Thus, the present study discusses the importance of state-owned multinational companies for contemporary capitalism. With a historical retrospective, it seeks to recover the evolution of state-owned companies in the United States, Germany and China. Through the Orbis database, from the company Bureau Van Dijk, an overview of multinational state-owned companies in the year 2020 is presented. And, finally, a theoretical debate is presented on how the dynamics of contemporary capitalism relate to the growth of multinational state-owned companies.