  Corporations across the world are highly interconnected in a large global
network of corporate control. This paper investigates the global board
interlock network, covering 400,000 firms linked through 1,700,000 edges
representing shared directors between these firms. The main focus is on the
concept of centrality, which is used to investigate the embeddedness of firms
from a particular country within the global network. The study results in three
contributions. First, to the best of our knowledge for the first time we can
investigate the topology as well as the concept of centrality in corporate
networks at a global scale, allowing for the largest cross-country comparison
ever done in interlocking directorates literature. We demonstrate, amongst
other things, extremely similar network topologies, yet large differences
between countries when it comes to the relation between economic prominence
indicators and firm centrality. Second, we introduce two new metrics that are
specifically suitable for comparing the centrality ranking of a partition to
that of the full network. Using the notion of centrality persistence we propose
to measure the persistence of a partition's centrality ranking in the full
network. In the board interlock network, it allows us to assess the extent to
which the footprint of a national network is still present within the global
network. Next, the measure of centrality ranking dominance tells us whether a
partition (country) is more dominant at the top or the bottom of the centrality
ranking of the full (global) network. Finally, comparing these two new measures
of persistence and dominance between different countries allows us to classify
these countries based the their embeddedness, measured using the relation
between the centrality of a country's firms on the national and the global
scale of the board interlock network.
