Financialization and Distribution from a Kaleckian Perspective: The United States, the United Kingdom, and Sweden Compared—Before and after the Crisis

Eckhard Hein, Petra Dünhaupt, Marta Kulesza and Ayoze Alfageme

International Journal of Political Economy, 2017, vol. 46, issue 4, 233-266

Abstract: In this article we analyze the effects of financialization on income distribution, before and after the Great Financial Crisis and the Great Recession, for the two liberal Anglo-Saxon economies, the United States and the United Kingdom, and for a typical Nordic welfare state economy, Sweden. We apply a Kaleckian perspective in which the focus will be on functional income distribution and thus on the relationship between financialization and the wage share or the gross profit share. According to this approach, financialization may affect aggregate wage or gross profit shares of the economy as a whole through three channels: first, the sectoral composition of the economy; second, the financial overhead costs and profit claims of the rentiers; and third, the bargaining power of workers and trade unions. We examine empirical indicators for each of these channels, both before and after the crisis. We find that the types of countries investigated here have shown broad similarities regarding redistribution before the crisis, however, with major differences in the underlying determinants. These differences have carried through to the period after the crisis and have led to different results regarding the development of distribution since then.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/08911916.2017.1407735 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mes:ijpoec:v:46:y:2017:i:4:p:233-266

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/MIJP20

DOI: 10.1080/08911916.2017.1407735

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Political Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().