Numerous researches on the economic growth analyze the role of conglomerates and evaluate their significant effects on the national economy. Especially in Korea, the relatively important contributions of big business group to the national economic growth has attracted a lot of interests. Though, there are also several reports which criticize negative effects in economic polarization of big business. For more accurate analysis in both sides, it is the top priority to work with quantitative measures of the performance and effects of big business groups as finding out analytic results. Thus, the present report aims for more objective discussions as dealing with data sets of corporate finance and analytic tools.

This research uses mainly KIS-Value DB which covers almost externally audited firms in this country. And we collect major financial variables for more than one decade, from 2001 to 2012. To make references for fundamental questions about top 30 big business groups, we focus on the rigorous quantitative analysis and try to capture significant features. For the performance of business groups, financial statements of each firm are collected. Employment, sales, asset, liabilities and profits are delineated for liberal interpretations. Especially the present report performs trend analysis for a couple of selected variables, so that we explain more about effects of top business groups on the national economic growth.

Empirical work is limited due to the partial availability of some figures. Besides, a few statistics have applied different measures over time for the same variable. Those gaps between statistics cause some difficulties in matching and measureing the level of contributions of korean conglomerates.

We need to mention that the aim of the present study is to capture the effects of big business in national economy over time by providing significant numerical measures. We expect this work might form the basis for further discussion.