Barkley Rosser says:
>Japan never had a very high rate of profit.
>The keiretsu were known for following a maximizing
>sales and market share strategy rather than a
>maximizing profit strategy.
Doug posted the following last year, however:
***** Re: Re: Keynesians and Post Keynesians and growth
by Doug Henwood
07 March 2000 20:44 UTC
Jim Devine wrote:
>What is the evidence for a falling rate of profit in Japan?
The OECD has suspended publishing its estimates of rates of return in
their Economic Outlook (for technical reasons relating mainly to the
U.S. numbers, I think), but in the June 1998 edition, they report a
Japanese avrage profit rate of 15.8% from 1971-81, which drifted
lower through the '80s, to 11.7% in 1998.
Doug
<http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/2000I/msg01964.html> *****
So, the profit rate did get from low to lower, & I think the change
is significant.
At 10:05 AM -0800 3/22/01, Jim Devine wrote:
>The way I think of this is that the tendency for the rate of profit
>it fall is basically a microeconomic theory of how capitalists have
>to keep on striving to expand or else they'll lose out to their
>competitors. In many cases, this causes a macroeconomic
>overaccumulation, which is sometimes -- in a "labor scarce economy"
>-- expressed as "overaccumulation relative to supply," which looks a
>lot like Marx's classical theory of the falling rate of profit.
>Something like this happened in the late 1960s/early 1970s in the
>US, combined with wage squeezes on profits combined the rise in
>international competition (cf. Brenner) that prevented the wage
>hikes from being simply passed onto consumers. I had an unreadable
>article on this subject published in the EASTERN ECONOMIC JOURNAL a
>long time ago.
Isn't Japan "labor scarce economy" due to its sexism, low birth rate,
resistance to immigration, "inflexibility" in the labor market, etc.?
Isn't the Japanese "problem" more "overaccumulation relative to
supply" than "overaccumulation relative to demand"?
Yoshie
