- France: according to a study that recently appeared in the French daily Les Echos, foreign investors, who were barely present in France in the middle of the 1980s, currently hold more than 50% of capital in French companies quoted on the stock exchange and 37.5% of capital from French companies as a whole. These statistics wee published by the Banque de France. In comparison, control of companies by non-residents is estimated to be at 30%, whereas in other large countries it only reaches 10% (only 5% in the USA and around 9% in Germany and Japan). According to the economist Pierre-Yves Gomez, this disproportion is due to historical reasons in France: "France, fourth world power, needed massive funding for growth and didn't have the necessary savings to back it up", which explains the importance of British or US pension funds who are keen to diversify their risks.