Is the world moving towards more or less competition in capital-intensive industries?
One thing I learned from their paper is that there’s been a remarkable rise in the profitability for the very top tier of firms ..
.. The high-return firms seem to be mostly in healthcare and information technology, not in traditional capital-intensive sectors such as manufacturing. Perhaps globalization is one reason for this. In manufacturing, globalization arguably has led to a pretty dramatic increase in competition. In information technology, globalization lets a firm such as Google use the same technology and ideas to earn high profits in the United States, and also Europe and elsewhere.