Grameen bank: A multinational corporation based on solidarity?

In the 16th chapter of David Korten´s famous book „When corporations rule the world“, the author claims the following: „According to the conventional economic thinking the (global) marketplace disciplines firms to maintain economical efficiency. In the global economy however, the largest corporations have learned how to manage competition to minimize it for themselves while maximizing it for others – using it as one more management tool to pass more on their own costs onto peoples and communities“. Korten states that contrarily to the neoliberal argument that global markets create better competition and higher efficiency, the reality which is happening around the globalising world is exactly the opposite one. Quantifying the market dominance of several oligopolies of big multinational corporations including General Motors, Wal Mart or Kraft Foods, the american economist argues that these evergrowing international businesses are rather systematically damaging and destroying the small and middle-sized national and local firms. As the corporations go on merging and fusioning in order to increase their efficiency and profitability, they are occupying still larger part of their respective markets. This process gives less and less space to the small businesses and therefore reduces the competition and concurrence. As a consequence of the imperative of the limitless growth, these multinationals are continuously downsizing their staffs, and concentrating power which leads to the growing centralization of benefits, and unemployment and empoverishment of the whole communities around the world´s peripheries.

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