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The Goliaths

巨头公司

In December 2004 Microsoft paid a massive $33billion dividend to itsshareholders. The largestpayment of its kind, it made up 6% of the increaseinAmericans' personal income that year. Examples ofhow big firms can have a bigimpact do not comemuch starker. These kinds of firm-specific shocksare typicallyexcluded from economists' models,which assume that individual businesses' upsanddowns tend to cancel each other out. Yet to understand how things like tradeand GDPevolve, tracking the biggest companies is essential.

2004年12月，微软向股东支付了高达330亿美元的股息。这在此类分红中算是最大额度的，在那年，占美国个人收入增加值的6%。关于大公司如何产生强烈影响的例子并不明显。这些公司特有的危机通常被排除在经济学家的模型之外，这些模型会假定个体工商户的收支往往会平衡。然而，了解贸易和GDP的发展，寻迹最大的企业是至关重要的。

At first sight, the numbers seem to justify taking a top-down view. Thebusiness world is huge:America has around 27m firms, Britain 4.8m. Each countrytrades with hundreds of othercountries across hundreds of industries, producingthousands of country-industry trade links.The global network runs to themillions. Because economies are built of millions of firms andtradingrelationships, each seems like a speck of dust:individual companies and exportchannelsshould not matter. This suggests that only common shocks can explainaggregatefluctuations：a workers' strike at one firm is not enough, but a generalstrike is.

乍一看，这个数字似乎证明了一个普遍的观点。商业世界是巨大的：美国有大约2.7千万家公司、英国4.8百万家。每个国家同其他成百个国家，在成百个行业进行交易，创造出数千条国家工业贸易链。全球网络运行达数百万个。因为经济由百万家公司及贸易关系所创造，每一条关系都类似于一粒灰尘：个人企业和出口渠道显得微不足道。这表明，只有共同冲击可以解释总体波动：一个工人在一个公司罢工是不够的，但是总罢工就可以。

Yet aggregate shocks do not explain volatility very well. A 2007 Bank ofSpain paper studiesOECD countries' trade balances. Common shocks(to wholecountries or global industries)explain only 45% of the variations. Hunting forthe cause of the other 55%。of tradefluctuations, the authors used finer data on8260 country-industry "flows"(59 industries and140 trading partners) for eachOECD member. The data show that the picture of trade asmillions of links isinaccurate; in fact, flows are extremely concentrated. Most linksareunimportant. For America 99% of trade flows accounted for just 25% of trade.But a few arevital: for the average OECD country the25 main country-industryflows explain two-thirds oftrade, and the 100 largest 85%。

然而总冲击同样也解释不了波动。一家2007西班牙银行报社研究经济合作与发展组织中成员国的贸易平衡。常见的冲击(整个国家或全球产业)只能解释45%的变化。为了寻找其他的55%的贸易波动的原因，作者用每个成员国8260的国家产业"现金流量"(59个产业和140个贸易伙伴)更精确的数据。数据显示，数以百万计的贸易联系前景是不准确的;事实上，流动非常集中。大部分的链接并不重要的。美国99%的贸易流动仅占贸易总额的25%。但有少部分是至关重要：在对普通的经合组织国家来说，25个主要国家工业流动可以解释三分之二的贸易，最大可达85%。