The great commercial agencies of the United States list about 1,700,000 individuals, firms, and corporations as being in business. About 350,000 corporations in the United States made returns under the Corporation Tax Law of the United States for the calendar year 1912. This would seem to indicate that about one-fifth of all business enterprises are organized in the corporate form. However, these figures do not in themselves give anything like an adequate idea of the relative importance of the corporate form. The 80% of business enterprises owned by individuals or by partnerships include, with comparatively few exceptions, only small concerns. The 350,000 corporations include nearly all the important enterprises of the country. It is interesting to note the distribution of these 350,000 corporations on the basis of their capitalization, which is as follows:

In other countries also, large enterprises are almost always organized under the form corresponding to the corporation. In the three years 1911-1913, nearly 1,000 joint-stock companies were authorized to operate in Russia; the average capital was about $750,000, showing that they were nearly all large enterprises. In Japan, out of 1,445 commercial banks, only 54 are owned by individuals and the rest by joint-stock companies.