La tasa de beneficio en la dinámica económica de los países europeos, 1984-2003

This paper investigates the fundamental relationship which has been established between investment and profit rate with the intention of analysing the factors behind the change in the patterns of profit rates during phases of expansion and recession in the European economies during the period 1984-2003. Taking a Kaleckian interpretation as a starting point, explain the inflections in the process of growth and fall in the profit rate in each phase of the cycle. Since capital productivity responds to inertial factors, the analysis reveals that those inflections in the profit rate follow the variations in the factors which make up the mark-up of the companies, in other words, the productivity of the employees, salaries and prices.