EMERGENCE NEWS

Multinational Companies and eWork

The EMERGENCE employer survey casts interesting light on multinational companies and eWorking in Europe. Despite some popular fears that Europe is being over-run by US or Japanese companies, the vast majority (92.5 per cent) of larger enterprises in Europe are independent companies or head offices. Of the establishments with over 50 employees surveyed, only 7.5 per cent were branches of other organisations. However, these branches were significantly more likely to be practising individual forms of eWork than independent establishments:
 

Table 1: Forms of eWork in Europe, by ownership structure

branches independent establishments Fully home-based eWork  2.8  1.6 Multilocational eWork 14.5  9.7 eLancers 12.2 11.2

Source: EMERGENCE European Survey (IES/NOP)

 

Where these branches were owned by foreign companies, we investigated where the head office was sited. Table 2 shows the top ten locations for head offices. Only eight of these top ten countries (the USA and Japan) are outside Europe, although two of the European countries (Norway and Switzerland) are outside the EU. Thus, although the United States remains the most important external owner of European businesses, it falls very far short indeed of outright dominance. We also investigated the location of head offices at the level of states within the USA. In many cases, our respondents were not sure of the exact location, but where this was known, it was recorded. Headed by high-tech California, home of Silicon Valley, these states are shown in order of importance in Table 3.		Table 2: Country of origin of foreign- owned branches in Europe: top 10
		1 USA 2 Germany 3 Netherlands 4 UK 5 France 6 Sweden 7 Norway 8 Belgium 9 Switzerland 10 Japan
		Source: EMERGENCE European Survey, 2000 (IES/NOP)

 

Table 3: Top locations of US multinational head offices
1	California	9	Missouri
2	Connecticut	10	New Jersey
3	Georgia	11	New York
4	Illinois	12	Ohio
5	Maryland	13	Pennsylvania
6	Massachusetts	14	Texas
7	Michigan	15	Washington
8	Minnesota
Source: EMERGENCE European Survey, 2000 (IES/NOP)

 

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