Exageration of the comparison is not the only point that should be challenged. Are there no other advantages US companies might have?

There is the massive and relatively uniform home market for a start. That makes growing much easier and is certainly an explanation of the success of US investment banks and a great help to Dell. Certainly it is part of the difference the biotech company noticed.

Then there is the Hollywood effect. Hollywood movies that wash their face at home can be effectively dumped on foreign markets. There is a structural advantage to being the largest market.

Turning things around it also surely begs the question of why large American companies can’t maintain their advantages. Is there an American equivalent of Nokia?

Maybe these particular things don’t actually amount to much and she probably has more than a grain of truth in her argument but why attribute all the difference to only slightly freer markets and not to other differences such as the network benefits of having a huge home market or the role of immigrant labour?

“France doesn’t have a word for entrepreneur” if I remember President Bush correctly.

What the real recently founded list really indicates is that the US had a head-start in IT and that it could set the global standards in this domain. Also that first mover advantages in fixed cost industries like this matter a lot - at least until the first mover has been able to set the standard.

I don’t have a list for Germany, but I would not be surprised if the only recently founded German giant were SAP.

What exactly do you mean by Internet boom here ?
- Hardware ?
- Software companies ?
- Trade to private customers ?
- Service providers ?
- E-commerce between companies ?
- News, Info and entertainment ?
- Deflated Dot-com bubble stocks ?
And which of these are all-or-nothing ? Why ?

Caveat: this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be doing more in the EU to address the issues of innovation, company formation and growth, of course we should. But again, as the actual article itself argues, things in France have improved significantly over the last decade. If there is an information revolution going on, I don’t imagine the French want to be left out of it forever.

BTW there is historical precedent here. The French were slower off the mark with the first industrial revolution too, and eventually they caught up. So don’t lets be so quick to write them off. Also the demographics - as we’ve been noting - are a lot better than many other EU countries.

@ pavel

Are you expressing a literary preference, or are you a relative?

What I think we need here is some scientific comparison. First of all we would need a list of the top 25 French companies by market cap. Then we could see. I doubt our French journalist friend did this.

Secondly: to what extent is market cap a valid comparison? I genuinely don’t know. We are in some ways comparing apples and pears, since the French system of funding may be more bank based than equity based. Beyond this I don’t see what it serves. The Chinese giants are mainly going to be State Owned Businesses recycled with some private finance. They may well dominate global markets 20 years from now. The Japanese companies mainly come from large conglomerates. What are we learning?

I still think there is a lot of scope for second mover advantage. You can live quite well, and get a lot of leisure time thrown in to boot.

That there are various models, that the Europeans generally were slow off the mark with the internet boom, and since that is all or nothing the ground is not retrievable, all this is pretty obvious. But are new giant companies - apart from Google - still being generated so rapidly in the US now as they were in the 90’s?

I mean there are a lot of questions, none of this is so easy that you can just say: bang, I’ve got you. If they were people wouldn’t have been arguing this around for years and years and years.

At least Microsoft, Intel, Cisco and Dell did not exist 40 years ago.

It’s not a majority of the top 25, but at least it proves that in the US it possible to achieve the top of the business within one’s lifetime. Now show me a similar story in recent France. One single case, please.

Look where’s Nouveau March? and where’s Amazon.com, eBay.com and Google.com now.

Pavel, I had considered that, but I thought that all that would prove is that French traders value firms with established track records and high revenues over start-ups with potential. I can’t really see a moral point about market structure there. Also, I couldn’t find a list to compare it to. I had considered how Microsoft and Intel weren’t on the list, but I suspect that most of the US firms that are under 40 years old and have enormous market caps are probably international tech firms, and there are other reasons why those firms tend to operate out of the US.

Edward, I agree with you about reducing unemployment - although I saw someone blog a piece in Alternatives Economiques about how government spending is the principal reason why unemployment is lower in the UK than France. (Actually, I thought it was you, but now that I’m looking for it, I can’t find it.)

I’m not claiming that everything is fine in France. Clearly it isn’t. I’m just not convinced that it’s government barriers to business that are the real problem. I don’t have a problem with more flexible labour markets, but I do think that government has to find ways to reduce the risks to workers.

Nice post. She of course is probably confusing definitions: everything would - as you suggest - depend on what you mean by ‘founded’. Even moving from Fortune to Forbes wouldn’t help her. If you take market cap (and not just sales) into account you still only add Microsoft I think.

The key issue for France would be labour market reform and reducing unemployment (and Bernanke earlier today was arguing that even the US needs labour market reform), and adapting the welfare system to be able to handle an ageing population. OTOH since she’s French and writing in a US newspaper, it’s hardly surprising if people are badly informed.