Corporation, the name for joint-stock companies widely used in the USA. The term is usually associated with capitalist trusts. But not all corporations can be classed as monopolies. Thus, in the USA there were 1,665,000 registered corporations in 1970, but only s^/eral thousand of them were in an eco/iomic position sufficient to categorise them as monopolies. Of these the 500 biggest industrial corporations totally dominated things: in 1970 their total assets amounted to 432,100 million dollars.