Is America Inc getting less dynamic, less global and more monopolistic?

Is it? The Economist set out to test all three hypotheses about American business: that it is less dynamic, less global and more concentrated. The share of workers employed at firms less than a year old fell from 4% of total employment in the 1980s to around 2% in the 2010s. Dealogic, a research firm, estimated that cross-border mergers and acquisitions by American firms as a share of domestic M&A activity declined from 16% in 2014 to 9% in 2019. The Economist looked at the share of revenue earned abroad for non-financial firms in the Russell 3000, a broad index of American firms. Imax, a cinema chain, has made over two-thirds of its revenue this year from Asia, up from two-fifths in 2017.Overall, the median firm's foreign sales as a share of its total sales has stayed roughly flat at 15%. So has the revenue-weighted average, which has oscillated around 35%. Two in five firms make more than half of their sales overseas, a proportion that has also remained more or less constant in the past four years. Bank of America, which has tracked the Herfindahl-Hirschman index, a gauge of market concentration, for firms in the Russell 3000 since 1986, reports that it hit a new high in 2020.This could be because deep downturns like last year's covid recession tend to favour big firms with healthy balance-sheets. Some big firms are getting a larger slice of a shrinking pie.