Financeirização, distribuição funcional da renda e crescimento econômico: uma análise teórica e empírica sobre os efeitos da financeirização na dinâmica econômica

Abstract

Financialization is a process whose definition is broad. In its most concrete form, this process manifests itself in the growing role and influence of financial agents and markets and, from the logic of accumulation that is specific to this sphere, vis-à-vis participation, the reasons and decisions that traditionally guide production and distribution of wealth in the real sphere of the economic system. The recent heterodox literature on growth and income distribution has analyzed the effects of financialization on the growth of aggregate demand. The income distribution treated here is functional. Otherwise, it is about the distribution between income classes, notably between wages and profits. Taking into account the undeniable importance of the theme and the fact that empirical studies referring to it are still scarce, the research proposal presented here aims to contribute to the literature in question by analyzing the potential effects of financialization on income distribution and the dynamics of aggregate demand, using the neo-kaleckian perspective on growth and functional income distribution as a starting point. In this sense, the direct impact of financialization on the share of income earmarked for wages, capital accumulation and consumption, respectively, is econometrically estimated. As a proxy for financialization, two variables are alternatively employed: total credit to households and total credit to the non-financial sector. The data collected for the construction of the panel includes a sample with observations for 43 countries, developed and developing, in the period from 1980 to 2017. The observations were extracted from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) database and the Penn Word Table (PWT). For the econometric specification, in order to achieve more robust results, three different models were used, namely: the Fixed Effects Model, the Random Effects Model and the Generalized Method of Moments in Differences Estimator (GMM) of Arellano and Bond (1991). The results found showed that financialization contributed to a redistribution of income at the expense of wages, a drop in physical capital investment and a drop in consumption. It was considered that there was a profit-free regime and ruled out the possibility of a debt-led demand regime ( economy driven by debt).