After exhausting the potential sources of summary level ownership information, we went straight to the source: the pension funds themselves. We were able to obtain information on the investments of 30 of the larger pension funds. Twelve of these 30 gave us complete listings and the other 18 partial listings. From these listings, and knowing the percent foreign ownership of the world's 300 largest pensions, we were able to make good estimates of pension fund ownership of 77 percent of the 1000 largest companies in the world.[i]

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[i] We calculated ownership estimates of the 1999 Business Week Global 1,000 (BW 1,000) companies by the world pension funds. Our methods were as follows: Pensions & Investment's Top 300 (P&I Top 300), published by Crain Communications, Inc., plus TIAA-CREF. (TIAA-CREF is not included in the P&I 300 because they have recently been reclassified as a mutual fund. However, we believe that TIAA-CREF is largely representative of pension fund investments and have added only their pension fund assets to our totals in the list of world pension funds.) The P&I Top 300 is an annual survey and ranking of the 300 largest pension funds in the world with total assets of $5.2 trillion in 1999. The total assets of the 1999 BW 1,000 companies were $19.7 trillion.

We endeavored to collect lists of equity investments (actual numbers of shares held) from the world pension funds. We were successful in accounting for complete equity investments of 12 of the larger pension funds and partial lists from 15 additional pensions. In this way, we were able to account for pensions totaling $1.1 trillion assets, or 21 percent of the total value of the world pensions. Using the total shares of each of the BW 1,000 companies held by the pension funds, we calculated an "average percent composition" for the world pension funds. This "average percent composition" represents the fraction of a pension's total assets represented by ownership of a given BW 1000 company. We then took the average percent composition, multiplied this number by the total assets of the pensions we were unable to account for, and summed these fractional ownership estimates to arrive at an estimate of world pension fund ownership estimates for the BW 1,000.

After eliminating estimates that were obviously unreasonable (over 100 percent ownership) and companies which had merged into other BW 1,000 companies, we were left with ownership estimates for 77 percent of the BW 1,000. Because equity investment lists were generated between mid-1998 and mid-1999, we calculated share prices and, thus, ownership estimates for 12/31/1998 values of the BW 1,000 companies. Although the BW 1000 was generated in mid-1999, we calculated the valuation of the 1999 BW 1,000 companies for 12/31/98 so as to provide estimates that would be more time-congruent with the equity investment estimates of the pensions.