Profit-led Regime Research Articles

An assessment of the debates over income distribution and growth in the Neo-Kaleckian literature

ABSTRACT Kaleckian literature is considered an important theme in the post-Keynesian school of economic thought. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the endeavors of forming a new consensus regarding essential economic issues, in particular achieving economic growth became a need. Thus, the Kaleckian models returned to be in the spot since these models tackle the impact of changes in the distribution of income and address the question whether a redistribution of income away from wages and towards profits is capable of boosting growth. In this sense, this paper return to Kaleckian insights and offers a theoretical discussion of the distributional effects on aggregate demand and economic growth. Moreover, through the lens of neo-Kaleckian tradition, the evolution of the debate on wage-led and profit-led regimes in recent decades can be traced.

Post-Pandemic Recovery and Sustainable Growth in the EU: A Post-Keynesian Approach

Once again, the EMU faces an economic crisis, this time caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. To avoid the mistakes of the insufficient response to the global financial crisis, it is vital that this time the focus will turn on achieving fast, sustainable recovery, instead of contractionary measures that would hinder recovery and long-term growth. This paper briefly presents the basic elements of the Post-Keynesian / Post-Kaleckian framework of analysis for the economic regimes. The concept of the wage-led and profit-led regimes is addressed, based on which it can be assessed what kind of policies are needed in an economy to promote sustainable, long-term growth. As the relevant literature finds that the Euro Area as a whole and most of the Eurozone members are wage-led, it is concluded that the EU needs to design and implement policies that will strengthen the labor share and address the long-standing problem of unemployment. Given the need to counter climate change, the proposed policies should be coordinated and used as tool to achieve the goals set by the European Green Deal.

Wage- and profit-led growth regimes: a panel-data approach*

The extensive empirical effort made in the growth and distribution literature to estimate whether economic growth is wage- or profit-led has not sufficiently considered the theoretical foundation of the Neo-Kaleckian model. This paper attempts to respect key tenets of the investment function by estimating a panel-data model in which country-specific structural characteristics and possible endogenous relationships in income distribution and economic growth are explicitly considered. The identification strategy is based on several estimates of the capital stock and the rate of capacity utilization for 61 countries over the period between 1995 and 2014. The main results suggest that the growth regime was wage-led in developed countries, while most developing countries exhibited a profit-led growth regime. Interestingly, however, while the profit-led regime occurs through the international trade channel in Latin American countries, in other developing countries, the causality channel is mainly related to the domestic investment function.

Overhead Labour Costs in a Neo-Kaleckian Growth Model with Autonomous Non-Capacity Creating Expenditures

ABSTRACT A notable feature of income distribution is the widening wage differential among workers: there is a redistribution in favour of managers at the detriment of ordinary workers. The paper incorporates this distinction between overhead managerial labour and direct labour into a neo-Kaleckian growth model with target-return pricing, where an autonomously growing demand component ultimately determines the long-run path of an economy. Our aim is to explore the role of overhead labour costs in the coevolution of income distribution and economic growth. We find that the profit share becomes an increasing function of the rate of capacity utilization, implying that empirical research based on the post-Kaleckian specification of investment is likely to be biased in finding a profit-led regime. Our model also features convergence to a fully adjusted position. We examine the parametric conditions under which the model achieves a wage-led growth regime in the long run, in the restricted sense that both the average rates of accumulation and utilization decrease during the transitional dynamics arising from an upward adjustment of the normal profit rate. Moreover, it is shown that a more equitable wage distribution between managers and ordinary workers will strengthen the wage-led nature of the economy.

Using non-linear estimation strategies to test an extended version of the Goodwin model on the US economy

There is a growing empirical literature that seeks to determine country growth and demand. One possible shortcoming of those studies is their sensitivity to the estimation strategy, which is linked to the time horizon. A profit-led regime has been found to be the most likely outcome when adopting an aggregative approach, while a wage-led regime is the most likely outcome when utilizing a structural estimation. Another potential weakness is that the empirical approaches adopted are mostly linear. To overcome these criticisms, we adopt wavelet analysis, which allows the decomposition of a time series into short- and long-term components, thereby enabling investigation of whether the growth regime switches over time. This paper tests an extended version of the Goodwin model for the US economy using data from 1967 to 2016. The results show that both the growth and demand regimes are sensitive to time and are profit-led in the short term and wage-led in the long term, thereby confirming Blecker's (2016) insight.

Growth, Distribution, and External Constraints: A Post-Kaleckian Model Applied to Brazil

ABSTRACT The purpose of this research is to analyze whether the Brazilian economy behaved under a wage-led or profit-led regime between 1960 and 2011, considering a Post-Kaleckian model in a context of external constraints. The time span is limited by data availability (i.e., 2011). To answer the question of whether the Brazilian economy works under a wage-led or profit-led regime, we propose a simple Post-Kaleckian model. The model suggests that a profit-led regime is more probable for Brazil. Moreover, a wage-led regime occurs when a balance of payments constrained growth model is taken into consideration. Likewise, the real exchange rate has a positive impact on economic growth through the export channel. This result is a novelty in the recent literature about the relationship between real exchange rate and economic growth within a Post-Kaleckian model. The Brazilian economy was chosen as it is one of the biggest economies in Latin America.

The origins and evolution of the debate on wage-led and profit-led regimes*

While Kaleckian authors tend to find that economies are in a wage-led demand regime, Goodwinian authors tend to find that economies are in a profit-led demand regime. This paper avoids econometric technicalities and provides instead a historical perspective, going back to the empirical study of Boddy and Crotty and that of Weisskopf, as well as to the debates that arose in the 1980s between but also within the two main strands of heterodox macroeconomics: the Marxians and the post-Keynesians. This hopefully will help to shed some light on the more recent controversy over the existence of profit-led or wage-led demand regimes. A noteworthy feature of the paper is the emphasis on the existence of overhead labour costs and hence the distinction between managers and ordinary workers. These are likely to bias empirical measurements of demand regimes towards the profit-led regime at high-frequency data; they may also give rise to paradoxical results; and they justify the claim that an increase in the wage share of ordinary workers is likely to have a positive effect on aggregate demand even if economies are profit-led.

Wage- and profit-led regimes under modern finance: an exploration

This paper generalizes the principle of effective demand to incorporate banking and finance as two distinct sectors. The traditional commercial banking sector is regulated and the modern shadow banking sector is mostly an unregulated provider of financial services. Through a stylized model the interconnectedness between the two sectors is analysed. The analysis shows how an almost infinite supply-side capacity of finance is created and explores its relation to the level of aggregate demand in the real economy. The impact of finance on the real economy is explored in both profit- and wage-led regimes at different levels of interconnectedness between commercial and investment banking.

Price and nominal wage Phillips curves and the dynamics of distribution in Japan

This study estimates two types of Phillips curves – the price Phillips curve and nominal wage Phillips curve – for the Japanese economy and analyses the institutional structure of the dynamics of effective demand and income distribution in each period from 1977 to 2007. The estimated results allow us to make the following three findings. First, the Japanese economy was a profit-led regime and a counter-cyclical wage share regime. The combination of regimes can make the dynamics of effective demand and income distribution unstable. Second, the dynamics of price and nominal wage do not reflect each other in Japan by labour–management cooperation. Finally, after 1997, the distributive regime in Japan switched from a counter-cyclical wage share to a pro-cyclical wage share regime because Japanese firms quickened their speeds of employment adjustment. As a result, the dynamics of effective demand and income distribution were stabilised.

Endogenous income distribution in the Bhaduri-Marglin model

The results of the Bhaduri-Marglin model build on the assumption of an exogenous profit share. The present paper examines critically the robustness of these results by asking how its results change if we take the endogeneity of the profit share into account. In doing so, the constituents of the latter (labor productivity and the real wage rate) are treated as endogenous. The paper finds that the conditions for wage- and profit-led regimes only change when we assume increases in the real wage rate to be followed by very strong labor rationalization. Furthermore, the paper shows how these additional channels can increase or decrease the profit-led/wage-led character of a regime and how they may even become a source of instability.

Stagnation or transformation of a dual economy through endogenous productivity growth

A growth model is developed for an open dual economy. The economy expands owing to a higher growth rate of labour productivity in the modern sector through the Kaldor-Verdoorn channel and higher effective demand through a Keynesian channel. The model incorporates a retardation mechanism affecting the slopes of productivity and output growth schedules as labour surplus and economies of scale diminish. A wage-led or profit-led regime and initial conditions may give rise to: de-industrialization in terms of both output and employment; a growth trap sustaining a situation of structural heterogeneity; or sustainable employment and adequate output and productivity growth.

Wage–price dynamics and income distribution in a semi-structural Keynes–Goodwin model

The paper studies the role of income distribution within a medium-scale macrodynamic model built in a Keynesian and Goodwinian tradition. Combining a wage and price Phillips curve, adjustments of an inflation climate, an IS relationship determining output, Okun’s law for employment and the Taylor rule for monetary policy, a semi-structural model is obtained that incorporates the most important macroeconomic channels in a closed economy. After assessing the reasonable time series variabilities in stochastic simulations, a deeper analysis is concerned with the stabilizing and destabilizing effects of the model’s parameters, and with a structural shift in income distribution. In many details of these investigations, the distinction between a wage-led and profit-led regime becomes important.