In business, the corporate sector or simply “corporate sector” – sometimes more popularly known as the main business sector – is a small collection of businesses that comprise a given country’s economy. The other two main sectors of an economy are the service sector, which include government and public services, and the market sector, which include businesses such as manufacturing, trading, and financial activities. Subdivided into two smaller but still important subsectors, these smaller sectors contribute to the country’s economy in diverse ways. They include: distribution, which include sales and production; infrastructure, which refer to the physical plant, property, and equipment that comprise the corporate sector; and corporate finance, which represent the financial activities of a corporation. Subtracting these smaller components from the larger economy brings us to the country’s total economy.
The country’s total economy is made up of corporations that create employment through wages earned and activities carried out by the corporation in the country. In international comparisons, many nations feature a very high percentage of corporations, which makes the comparison of national economies much more difficult. Because of this, many scholars have looked to other indicators to determine the overall health of a nation’s economy. One method used is to compare the performance of corporations as against the performance of other corporations. For example, national wealth is measured by GDP, while corporate wealth is measured against overall economic performance.
Whether or not a nation’s economy should be studied in isolation or as a part of other economic statistics depends on the extent to which business-people can be analyzed. For instance, certain countries, like India and China, have a large number of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), whose development potential is unmatched by any other nation in the world. These businesses provide a significant boost to the economy, while benefiting the population at large. A similar case is the case of Taiwan, which has a thriving domestic economy driven largely by small and medium-sized businesses. Corporate social responsibility has become a highly important part of economic analysis, leading scholars to believe that the increasing sophistication of business-people in such endeavors makes it a fruitful area of study.