it to the government, but less than 25% for at least one of the ownership layers that link it to the government.

Currently, the BOS database includes 53,675 state-owned enterprises, as defined by the definition in section 2.2.1, across 80 countries. However, the coverage is varied across countries, even after implementing the different data validation efforts explained in section 4.4.3. Given this, to guarantee robustness in our results, we focus on 36 countries for which the coverage on employment and revenues is at least 70%. Tables A.5.1 to A.5.10 (in the Annex) present aggregate statistics and descriptive statistics of SOEs by region, type of contestability, type of ownership, age, and size. In our sample of 36 countries, we have a total of 40,596 SOEs with employment and revenues totaling at around 9 million workers and 1.2 trillion USD, respectively. Of these SOEs, 76% have a majority state participation, 14% are SOEs with blocking minority participation, and 10% are SOEs with minority state participation.

Europe & Central Asia (ECA) is the region with the best coverage, so that 15 countries of the countries in our reduced sample are in this region (Table A.5.1). The median employment of SOEs for countries in this region is 28 workers. In comparison to the other regions the median employment is much lower as the median SOE in each of the remaining regions has more than 100 workers (Table A.5.2). The median Latin America (LAC) SOE is more than ten times as large as the median SOE in ECA. These employment patterns are also maintained for operating revenues. That is, the median firm in ECA has the lowest level of revenue while median LAC SOE has the highest level of revenue. Although most SOEs are majority owned across all regions, firms in LAC are associated with higher government control as more than 90% of SOEs are majority owned. Majority owned SOEs in East Asia & Pacific (EAP) account for only 61% of all SOEs; the share of SOEs with blocking minority participation is the highest for this region at 25%.

In our sample of 36 countries, SOEs are present predominantly in competitive sectors that are viable for private participation. We find that 69% of SOEs operate in competitive activities (e.g., manufacturing of textiles), 16% are in partially contestable industries (e.g., air transportation services) and 15% are Natural Monopolies (e.g., water and sewerage) (Table A.5.3). For the full description of the sectors and their classification, please refer to Dall'Olio, et al. (2022). This suggests that in many countries, SOEs do not operate based on an efficiency-based rationale, but there may be other considerations for the participation of the state in the economy. In terms of employment and revenues, SOEs in competitive industries are smaller than firms in natural monopoly and partially contestable sectors (Table A.5.4). The median employment of an SOE in competitive, natural monopoly, and partially contestable activities is 28, 35, and 45, respectively. The revenues of the median SOE in natural monopoly sectors is 1.5 times that of the median SOE in competitive industries. For the median SOE in partially contestable sectors, operating revenues are 2.4 higher than the median SOE in competitive markets. As expected, governments have higher control of SOEs in natural monopoly sectors, as 90% of natural monopoly SOEs are majority owned. A striking finding for our sample is that SOEs in competitive industries are associated with higher control than SOEs in partially contestable sectors, although the efficiency rationale for state participation is much weaker in these sectors.

Two-thirds of the SOEs in our sample of 36 countries are directly owned by governments, while the remaining SOEs are indirect subsidiaries (Table A.5.5). This shows the importance of considering indirectly owned companies in measuring the state footprint within economic activity. Comparing directly owned SOEs to indirect subsidiaries, we find that there are almost no differences in the median level of employment (Table A.5.6). However, the median directly owned SOE is smaller than the median indirect subsidiary in terms of operating revenues. SOEs that are directly owned by the government are also associated with higher government control in terms of shareholding participation. More than 91% of 30