No abstract

Después de que lo tildaron durante mucho tiempo de ser uno de los países más desigualitarios del mundo, Brasil experimenta desde la segunda mitad de los años noventa del siglo pasado una disminución de sus desigualdades de ingresos. Esta evolución es el resultado del proceso de “desindustrialización relativa” en el cual entró este país a finales de los años ochenta y no una consecuencia de las políticas económicas que emprendió el gobierno de Lula. Al contrario de lo que se podía suponer, la aparición de una nueva clase media tampoco constituye necesariamente una oportunidad para el crecimiento económico de Brasil.

Because of its high interest rates, Brazil attracts more and more speculative capital flows, called "hot money", under the form of foreign loans, direct or portfolio investments. Actually, the country is directly involved in a carry-trade strategy that tends to appreciate the real, what penalizes the Brazilian exportations of manufactured products. Moreover, capital inflows are extremely volatile, and their departure, causing a fall in loans granted to the Brazilian private banks, could provoke a dangerous burst of the speculative bubble they have contributed to form in the Brazilian real estate sector.

RESUMO: A financeirização da economia brasileira é frequentemente criticada como sendo responsável pela desaceleração da acumulação de capital no país. Na verdade, muito altas taxas de juros são mantidas a fim de financiar a dívida pública, o que fomenta capitalistas para conseguir mais títulos do Tesouro em vez de investir na área produtiva. No entanto, a evolução da taxa de lucro nesta área também explica a relação especial existente entre os capitalistas, finanças e investimento produtivo, como mostrou Marx mais de um século atrás. PAlAVRAS-ChAVE: investimento; finanças; lucro; desindustrialização ; Brasil.ABSTRACT: The financialization of the Brazilian economy is often criticized as being responsible of the slowdown of capital accumulation in this country. Indeed, very high interest rates are maintained in order to finance the public debt, and this fosters capitalists to get more Treasury bonds rather than to invest in the productive area. Nevertheless, the evolution of the profit rate in this area also explains the particular relation existing between capitalists, finance and productive investment, as Marx showed it more than a century ago.

<p>La financiarización de la economía brasileña con frecuencia es señalada como la mayor responsable de la disminución de la velocidad del proceso de acumulación en ese país. Así, tipos de interés muy elevados, particularmente con el fin de financiar la deuda pública, incitan más a adquirir bonos del tesoro que a invertir en la esfera productiva. Sin embargo, la evolución del índice de provecho en esta última también explica la relación de los empresarios con la inversión. En efecto, el fin del "milagro económico" y la crisis de la década de 1980 pueden ser analizados como consecuencias de un descenso del índice de provecho en la industria. Esta evolución explica en gran parte la orientación masiva de los inversionistas hacia la esfera financiera. Por esta razón, la financiarización es estudiada aquí como una consecuencia, y no como una causa, de las dificultades encontradas en la esfera productiva.</p>

No abstract

For the past decade, China has faced an extremely sharp rise in property prices and increasingly large investments made in this sector. Although some economists consider this change to be no more than the result of the increase in urban salaries that has gone hand-in-hand with China's strong economic growth, this article will show that it is in fact a "property bubble" resulting from the speculative activities of certain economic agents operating in this sector. Local authorities play a major role in this, especially in their efforts to increase their income, and their behaviour needs to be analysed in order to better understand that a bursting of this bubble might expose economic problems of a far deeper structural nature than those usually identified.

Since 2012, China is confronted with a slowing down of its economic growth, and various studies about the middle-income trap wonder about the capacity of this country to reach the category of high-income per capita countries. Most of the time, the increase of wage costs, and more particularly of unit labor costs, is accused of being responsible for this slowing down, through the loss of international competitiveness in particular. Nevertheless, it is important to put in perspective this explanation, because the increase of the unit labor cost seems less dangerous than the decrease of capital productivity, which a reversion to the Marxist analysis allows us to better understand.