Forskarseminarium: finansialiseringen av icke-finansiella företag i Sverige
Pontus Blüme och Gustav Ingman, ekonomhistoriker i Stockholm, presenterar ett artikelutkast om finansialiseringen av icke-finansiella företag i Sverige. Se abstract nedan.
Plats: Kafé Marx. För portkod, mejla forskning@cmsmarx.org
Textunderlag kan fås direkt från författarna (ca en vecka i förväg). Kontakta ingman.gustav@gmail.com och pontus.blume@gmail.com
The non-financialisation of the non-financial firm
Pontus Blüme and Gustav Ingman
A prominent strand of heterodox economics holds that non-financial corporations have, since the 1980s, derived an increasing share of their income from financial sources. This claim is known as the “financial turn” narrative, and functions as a key building-block to financialisation theory and research more generally. Drawing on both aggregate firm-level data from Statistics Sweden and manually constructed time series from the annual reports of Sweden’s nine largest manufacturing conglomerates from 1950 to 2025, this article argues that the empirical basis for this theory rests on an accounting illusion. The apparent rise of financial income in national and aggregate corporate accounts is shown to be an artifact of globalised value chains and the proliferation of corporate group structures, in which operating subsidiaries transfer profits to parent companies through intra-group dividend distributions. What is in essence surplus value from productive activity becomes reclassified in aggregate accounts as financial rent. By separating parent company accounts from consolidated group data, we demonstrate that the financial turn largely disappears when intra-group transfers are removed. These findings cast doubt on the key empirical claim underpinning influential econometric studies by Krippner, Stockhammer, and Orhangazi, and suggest that the concept of financialisation, at least as applied to the income structure of non-financial firms, is in need of reconsideration.
Adress
Kungsgatan 84
112 27
Stockholm
Sverige
