This is a non-exhaustive world-wide list of government-owned companies. The paragraph that follows was paraphrased from a 1996 GAO report which investigated only the 20th-century American experience. The GAO report did not consider the potential use in the international forum of SOEs as extensions of a nation's foreign policy utensils. A government-owned corporation is a legal entity that undertakes commercial activities on behalf of an owner government. Their legal status varies from being a part of government to stock companies with a state as a regular stockholder. There is no standard definition of a government-owned corporation (GOC) or state-owned enterprise (SOE), although the two terms can be used interchangeably. The defining characteristics are that they have a distinct legal for