Monitoring multinational enterprises: How the OECD and UNSD are harnessing open data
by Graham Pilgrim (graham.pilgrim@oecd.org) and Eugene Chang (eugene.chang@oecd.org), OECD Statistics and Data Directorate
Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) are key actors in the global economy. In 2023, the top 500 MNEs generated over USD 21 trillion in revenues, greater than the combined GDP of the European Union. They play an increasing role in our lives, whether you are purchasing a new car, asking Generative AI for recipe inspiration, or streaming your favourite song. However, despite their monumental scale, the cross-border nature of their activities means National Statistical Offices (NSOs) only hold information relating to their jurisdiction. Confidentiality concerns often prevent the sharing of this information, making it difficult to see the global picture.
The OECD-UNSD Multinational Enterprise Information Platform
To overcome this, the OECD and United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) developed the Multinational Enterprise Information Platform (MEIP), relying solely on publicly available information. The Platform is updated annually, with the third release, covering the period to 31st December 2023, now available.
The Platform gathers information on the world’s 500 largest MNEs by market capitalisation, facilitating a comprehensive view of their physical and digital presence, and provides a one-stop-shop for data on MNEs and their global networks. In total the platform matches over 130,000 subsidiaries and 120,000 websites to the 500 MNEs.
A key benefit of the Platform is the ability to drill down into an individual MNE, without confidentiality concerns. For example, you might want to distinguish the international presences of Nvidia and Intel. Starting with Intel, we can identify 94 subsidiaries, with 31 in the United States and the rest spread over 26 other jurisdictions. Their digital presence is even more dispersed, with 133 websites across 51 jurisdictions. Meanwhile, Nvidia have a narrower physical presence (13 identified subsidiaries in 7 jurisdictions) and digital presence (79 websites across 29 jurisdictions).
But this is only the beginning: Explore the dashboard for insights on the companies that interest you.
MNEs in the news
Numerous elections, events, and megatrends made 2024 an eventful year. Our updated news database uses GDELT – a database of roughly 200 million worldwide news articles using text analytics to extract information relating to companies, locations, individuals and topics – to map news articles to the top 500 MNEs.
In total, over 4 million articles mention one of our 500 MNEs explicitly, roughly 2% of the articles in GDELT. Combined, these MNEs receive more mentions than any individual country. One of the top trending topics of 2024 was Artificial Intelligence, with over 150,000 articles – interestingly, 34% of these articles also mentioned one of our 500 MNEs, demonstrating their important roles in AI development and use.
The importance of our 500 MNEs varies widely by jurisdiction. For example, of the 2.6 million articles mentioning the United States just over 10% also mention one of our 500 MNEs. This may not be surprising, given almost half our companies are headquartered in the United States. However, this number is higher for China (12%) and India (11%), suggesting that although a significant number of MNEs in our sample may not be headquartered there, these two countries play a noteworthy role in the functioning of these MNEs.
Figure 1. Importance of 500 MEIP MNEs by jurisdiction
This news database also allows users to examine individual companies, for example, looking for spikes in media coverage which could correspond to mergers, acquisitions, or controversy. One such example is Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) which announced its agreement to purchase Covestro in October 2024. This transaction represented a significant investment by the United Arab Emirates in a German Headquartered company.
What’s next
The Multinational Enterprise Information Platform (MEIP) is a robust foundation on which data can be linked and new insights built. However, this is an ongoing project, and our work is not finished.
This year we integrated additional data from the Danish business registry, which has significantly enhanced our understanding of the activities of the 500 largest MNEs within Denmark. The registry makes available email addresses and MEIP looks for connections using the domain of each email. For example, Spotify Denmark ApS (Registry Number: 3385348) has a contact email of copenhagen@spotify.com, meaning MEIP is now able to match this company to Spotify AB (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Connecting Spotify AB to Spotify Denmark ApS using the Danish business registry
Our implementation of this approach demonstrates that relatively low-cost methods, which do not break confidentiality requirements or require the implementation of a public beneficial ownership register, could be implemented on a wider scale. Other jurisdictions could make similar data available either publicly or directly to the OECD and UNSD for the purposes of profiling MNEs.
In the coming months and years OECD and UNSD will be working to link new data sources and refine the tools through which users can explore the data. For example, we are exploring the integration of financial variables sourced from structured data sources so that users can quantify revenue, profit, and employees for each company.