The Levy-Kalecki profit equation in action: the Spanish case 2015
https://love-and-theft-2014.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-levy-kalecki-profit-equation-in.html @
Nathan Tankus Where do profits come from? 2020/07/24
https://love-and-theft-2014.blogspot.com/2020/07/nathan-tankus-nathantankus-this-is.html
ニューケインジアン/主流のマクロがどれだけ基本的な現象を不必要にそして記述的に判読できなくするかは驚くべきことです。説明（Levy-Kalecki方程式）は依然としてポスト・ケインズ派の強みです。政府の赤字が増えると、民間部門の利益も増える可能性があります。
It's amazing how much of New Keynesian / mainstream macro makes basic phenomena needlessly and descriptively illegible. Description (the Levy-Kalecki equation) remains a core Post-Keynesian strength: higher govt deficits are likely to lead to higher private sector profits.
https://twitter.com/irvingswisher/status/1370902313817288709?s=21
The Levy-Kalecki profit equation in action: the Spanish case
Javier López Bernardo – 26th of November, 2015 ★
https://www.eoi.es/blogs/the-spanish-paradox/2015/11/26/the-levy-kalecki-profit-equation-in-action-the-spanish-case/
レビー・カレッキの利益方程式の実践：スペインのケース
ハビエル・ロペス・ベルナルド - 2015年11月26日
マーティン・ウルフは最近、企業の黒字が「大節制」の間に果たした役割を思い出させてくれた。彼は、この時期に企業の総貯蓄額（経常収入から経常支出を差し引いた額、資本支出を除く）が増加した一方で、企業の投資水準は停滞したままであったという周知の事実を報告している。つまり、論理的に必然的に、企業はこの期間中、純資産を蓄積していたことになる。ウルフは、「企業が構造的な金融黒字を出している限り、マクロ経済の均衡には財政赤字が必要であることを受け入れなければならない」と結論づけているが、これにはほとんど異論はない。
同時に、スペインの報道機関（ここではスペイン語）は、2015年の第1～3四半期に非金融企業の利益が28.6％（2014年の第1～3四半期と比較して）増加したと報じていますが、これは主に「経済活動の改善」と「一過性の（非経常）収入」の影響によるものです。この2つの記事は、スペインのマクロ経済の利益シリーズの最新情報を提供し、スペインのマクロ経済のパフォーマンスに対するその意味を説明するのに十分な後押しとなりました。
このブログの常連読者は、私が通常、レビー・カレッキの利益方程式を用いて企業部門全体の収益性を研究していることをご存知だろう（詳しい説明はこちら）。
これは、マクロ経済の利益をその源泉に応じて分解するための便利なツールである（しばらくしてから見てみよう）。レビー・カレツキの利益方程式には、もう一つの利点があります。それは、明白なものですが、経済学者はしばしば見落としています。利益ウォッチャーにとって幸運な国である米国では、経済分析局がすでに企業利益（通常知られているNIPA利益）のシリーズを提供していますが、これは例外的なことで、他の国々（SNAの勧告に従っている国々）はこの数字を公表しておらず、非常に近いもの（総貯蓄）を公表していますが、同じものではありません - 確かに、スペイン銀行がBalance Sheet Data Officeで行っているように、多くの統計機関が企業レベルのミクロ・データベースを報告していますが、それらは国民経済計算の範囲外です。したがって、レビー・カレッキの演習（利益シリーズの取得）は、企業利益のマクロ経済的な内訳を提供するという点で価値があるだけでなく、米国のような有利な状況にないこれらの国々に光を当てることができるからです。
スペインにおけるレビー・カレッキの利益（1999年～2014年
それに、スペインのケースは、レビー・カレッキの利益方程式の有用性を示す、特に示唆に富むケースです。実は、スペインの最近の経済史ほど、このツールの応用例は思いつきません。数年前に他の2人のエコノミストと一緒に書いた論文の中で、私たちはすでに、2000年以降のスペインにおけるLK利益の反直感的な進化について指摘しました。大雑把に言えば、2007年までは利益シリーズに上昇傾向があり、2007年から2013年までは減少し、それ以降はほぼ横ばいであるとお考えかもしれません。その場合、文章の最後の部分だけが正しいということになりますね。次の図は、1999年以降のLK利益（非金融法人＋金融法人）の推移を示したものです：Levy-Kalecki Spain
いくつかの背景が必要です。LKシリーズは国民経済計算から来ているので、未実現のキャピタルゲインは含まれていません。国民経済計算の目的は、定義上、価格ではなく実質的な生産の変化を測定することであり、実現していない（そしてほとんどの実現済みの）キャピタルゲインが所得・生産勘定に含まれないのはそのためです。一言で言えば、キャピタルゲインは所得ではありません。
スペインでは、2000年代の高騰期に、企業（特に不動産業や金融業）が計上した利益の大部分がこの性質のものでした。しかし、企業の利益のうち「営業」の部分をLKの利益計算式で見ると、状況は少し違っていた。1999年にはGDPの約6.7%を占めていた利益が、2005年には3.3%にまで減少したのだ。この変化を何かの冗談だと思っているなら、それは間違いだ。…
★
Martin Wolf has recently reminded us the role that corporate surpluses played during the 'Great Moderation'. He reports the well-known fact that while corporations saw how their gross savings (i.e. current revenues minus current expenses, capital expenses excluded) rose during this period, the level of corporate investment remained stagnant. This means, as a matter of logical necessity, that corporations were accumulating net assets over the entire period. Wolf concludes that 'it has to be accepted that, so long as the corporate sector runs a structural financial surplus, macroeconomic balance is likely to require fiscal deficits', something which I can hardly disagree with.
At the same time, the Spanish press (here, in Spanish) reports that non-financial corporations have seen a growth in profits, during the first three quarters of 2015, of 28.6% (in comparison to the first three quarters of 2014), due mainly to 'an improvement of the economic activity' and the impact of some one-off (non-recurrent) revenues. Both articles have nudged me enough to provide an update of the Spanish macroeconomic profit series and to explain their implications for the Spanish macroeconomic performance.
Regular readers of this blog will know that I usually study the profitability of the corporate sector as a whole using the Levy-Kalecki profit equation (see here for a thorough explanation),
which is a handy tool to break down macroeconomic profits according to their sources – as we will see in a while. The Levy-Kalecki profit equation has another advantage, an obvious one, but often overlooked by economists: it provides the only measure for the absolute amount of profits using national accounts data. In the US, the lucky land for profit-watchers, the Bureau of Economic Analysis already provides series for corporate profits (NIPA profits, as they are usually known), but that's an exception, because the rest of countries (that follow the recommendations of the SNA) do not publish this figure, but something that is very close (gross savings), but not the same – true, many statistical agencies report micro-databases at the firm level, as the Bank of Spain does with the Balance Sheet Data Office, but they are outside from the scope of the National Accounts. Therefore, the Levy-Kalecki exercise (i.e. to retrieve profit series) is not only valuable because it provides a macroeconomic breakdown for corporate profits, but also because it can shed some light for these countries that are not in the same favourable situation as the US is.
Levy-Kalecki profits in Spain, 1999-2014
Besides, the Spanish case is an especially instructive case of the usefulness of the Levy-Kalecki profit equation. Actually, I can hardly think of a better application of this tool than the recent economic history of Spain. In a paper that I wrote with two other economists some years ago, we already noted the counterintuitive evolution of LK profits in Spain since 2000. You may be thinking that, roughly speaking, there was an upward trend in the profits series up to 2007, then a decline from 2007 to 2013, and since then more or less they have remained flat. Well, in that case, you would have got right only the last part of the sentence. The following figure shows the evolution of LK profits (non-financial plus financial corporations) since 1999:
Some background is needed. The LK series come from National Accounts, so they do not include unrealised capital gains. The purpose of the National Accounts is, by definition, to measure changes in real production, not in prices, and that's why unrealised (and most of the realised) capital gains cannot be found in the income and product accounts – they can be found in the revaluation accounts, but that's another story. In a nutshell, capital gains are not income.
In Spain, during the 'roaring' 2000s a huge chunk of profits booked by corporations (especially real estate and financial ones) were of this nature. However, when one looks at the 'operating' component of firms' profits through the LK profit equation, things were a bit different. Profits declined from around 6.7% of GDP in 1999 to 3.3% in 2005 – if you think this evolution is some kind of joke, try to plot the evolution of gross savings of non-financial plus financial corporations as a % of GDP, the closest figure we have in the National Accounts to the profits I am reporting here. For newcomers, this range of numbers (3.3% – 6.7%) is quite low in comparison to other economies. For instance, the US historical average has been around 7.5% and in the UK a bit less. This low number should have warned us about the real profitability of Spanish firms. Since then, profit margins have been climbing up to the current 8%, and they have been quite stable for a few years. This period has coincided with massive write-offs by Spanish financial firms, which have produced exactly the opposite effect that they produced before the crisis. I think that the reason why the LK series seems now to be more reasonable (or at least closer to what one would expect) is that the Spanish pre-crisis business model (over reliance in real estate) has gone, and now that non-income generating activities are coming back to normal levels in the profit and loss statement of Spanish firms, then the importance of income generating activities should be clearly reflected. Summing up, the Spanish case shows that over long periods of time the LK profit series can be more informative on the real health of the corporate sector than measures reported directly by firms.
The 'sources' of profits can give us some additional insights. Up to the crisis LK profits were driven by investment, notably investment by the household sector (the investment split is not displayed in the graph) and households that were reducing their savings. Government was roughly neutral with some surplus in the years just before the crisis (which indicates, by the way, that the Spanish crisis did not have anything to do with fiscal irresponsibility, as many media outlets want us to believe) and the external sector was a big drag on corporate profitability. One of the main features of the Spanish series is the low contribution of dividends, for in many other countries they fluctuate between 3% and 4.5% of GDP (e.g. US and UK), whereas in Spain they barely reach 2.5%. On the other hand, the post-crisis period has been led by a large government intervention and by the improvement in the current account, which is now a (small) positive contribution to the Spanish profits: these two forces have balanced a sluggish investment and a household sector that has come back to higher levels of savings. Overall, in my opinion, except for the low levels of investment, the post-crisis profit composition of the Spanish economy is a much better one than the one displayed in the pre-crisis period: the post-crisis profit composition can last longer without creating huge (internal and external) imbalances in the Spanish economy.
And the one-million-dollar question is: what about the future? This is a difficult question (you know, economists are good at predicting the past, not the future), but there are two things that something can be said about them. First, the current low levels (from a historical perspective) of investment provide room for further increases in profit margins; an improvement in investment will certainly happen in 2016 given further improvements in national economic activity – our most likely scenario for Spain in 2016 if no big international shock occurs, notably China. And second, the Spanish government is known to be committed to further reductions in the deficit number until (at least) 2018 – although it will depend, of course, on the composition of the new government that will be elected in December. However, it will be crucial as well to follow the current account, given that its evolution can make all the difference and can hinder on the sustainability of Spanish profits. Although the Spanish export performance has been impressive in the last two decades (and there is no reason to believe it will come to an end soon) and the weak euro and oil prices we have seen in 2015 have helped a bit lately, the low growth of Spain's main trading partners (euro countries) and the halt in world trade are major challenges that Spanish firms are bound to face.
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