Abstract 摘要

 

金融化鼓励生产的结构调整，与企业的经营缩小其范围，以核心竞争力。和企业的垂直和国际瓦解生产上升的能力，使他们能够保持成本加价。因而利润和股东价值。即使是在经济增长放缓的背景下。在利润分享由此产生的崛起，不支持从离岸动态收益经常预测，由于金融化压力已经减少了固定投资，允许较高的股息支付，股份回购，并购活动及其他金融资产购买。本文探讨在其他工业化国家在全球价值链金融化链接，其运作的可持续性。结论简单地认为，非金融企业部门在目前金融板块跌幅脸上的作用。This paper links the financialization of non-financial corporations to the extensive development of global value chains by these corporations. The main focus is the US and its offshoring in China. Financialization has encouraged a restructuring of production, with firms narrowing their scope to core competence. And the rising ability of firms to disintegrate production vertically and internationally has allowed them to maintain cost mark-ups . and thus profits and shareholder value . even in a context of slower economic growth. The resulting rise in the profit share has not supported dynamic gains from offshoring as often predicted, since financialization pressures have reduced fixed investment to allow for higher dividend payments, share buybacks, M&A activity and other financial asset purchases. The paper explores the sustainability of the global value chain financialization link and its operation in other industrialized countries. The conclusion briefly considers the role of the non-financial corporate sector in the face of the current financial sector decline. 

 

Introduction 介绍

 

研究全球价值链的全球化生产过程是如何治理的理解做出了贡献。

威廉·米尔贝格：转移的来源和利润421性质龙头企业，他们的关系到供货企业，并为这些供应商的产业升级“的前景用途。这已经连接了研究经济发展和企业管理的问题。但迄今为止，价值链的文献中没有任何详细的资金流动还是什么全球化生产的影响已被广泛称为“金融化”考虑。威廉姆斯（2000年）是这个空白，在全球价值链框架颇有微词：[T]他商品链的概念，由Gereffi和Korzeniewicz（1994年）为普及，被广泛认为不成问题接受，即使这是一个完全不够的方式来代表像福特坚定其中可变集零部件生产，汽车组装，金融，汽车租赁和后市场服务的经济动力矩阵的选择。 （威廉姆斯，2000年，第6页）本文是开始填写到威廉姆斯是指空隙的努力。我特别关注美国龙头企业和他们的低成本供应商。Research on global value chains has contributed to an understanding of how globalized production processes are governed.  

William Milberg: Shifting sources and uses of profits 421 nature of the lead firms, their relation to supplier firms and the prospects for ‘industrial upgrading’ by these suppliers. This has connected the research to questions of economic development and business management. But to date the value chain literature has not considered in any detail the implications of globalized production for the flow of funds or what has become widely known as ‘financialization’. Williams (2000) is quite critical about this lacuna in the global value chains framework: [T]he concept of commodity chain, as popularized by Gereffi and Korzieniewicz (1994), was widely accepted as unproblematic even though this was a completely inadequate way to represent the financially motivated matrix choices of a firm like Ford which variably combines component production, car assembly, finance, car rental and after-market services. (Williams, 2000, p. 6) This paper is an effort to begin to fill the void to which Williams refers. I focus in particular on US lead firms and their low-cost suppliers. I argue that the enormous expansion of global value chains has brought a lowering of input costs to lead firms, allowing them to maintain and even increase cost mark-ups, and thus profit rates and the economy-wide profit share, even during a period when domestic (US) product market prices were not moving upwards at historical rates. This shift in the sources of profits . from domestic product markets to foreign input markets . has had a number of financial implications. For one, it has contributed to the maintenance of profit rates and the increase in the profit share of national income in industrialized countries. This has coincided with a decline in manufacturing in most countries, and thus has permitted companies to return a greater share of net revenues to shareholders rather than reinvesting these revenues in new productive capacity. In the financialization literature this is attributed to the ‘shareholder value revolution’ that began in the 1980s. In the global value chains literature, the process is seen as the increasing focus on ‘core competence’, a managerial strategy that became popular around the same time.1 Second, export revenue growth in developing countries resulting from the expansion of global supply chains has been converted into rapid expansion of manufacturing productive capacity in low-wage countries and, in turn, into capital flows from the low-wage to the industrialized countries. The latter constitutes a ‘reverse capital flow’, supporting asset values in the industrialized countries and especially the US. This provides further impetus to the process of financialization. This paper is thus an effort to go beyond the inclusion of financial activities in ‘matrix choices’ of firms, in order to explore the interdependence of the processes of the globalization of production and financialization, that is, to link the issue of corporate governance to that of supply-chain governance. I find that the globalization of production by US firms has helped to sustain higher levels of financialization of the US non-financial corporate sector and this financialization creates greater incentives for cost-reducing and flexibility-enhancing offshore production by US lead firms. To put it differently, the  422 Economy and Society sustainability of a ‘finance-led growth regime’ . questioned, for example, by Boyer (2000) and Watson (2007) . is enhanced by the successful governance of global value chains by lead non-financial corporations. In the current financial sector crisis, it is precisely the non-financial corporate sector that some point to as the lynchpin of an economic recovery. The deep engagement of this sector in global value chains will affect its ability to play such a role effectively. This paper contains seven sections. The second section reviews the processes of financialization and global value chains. In the third section I take up the issue of the shifting sources of profit and the following section looks at the changing uses of profit. These sections focus largely on the US and its international trade with low-income countries. The fifth section looks briefly at the situation from the perspective of the leading low-wage trading partner of the US, China, and its trade, investment and capital flows. The sixth section explores the issues of sustainability and replicability in the interdependent relation between global value chains governance and financialization. The seventh section concludes with a brief discussion of how the financialization globalization link may evolve in response to the recent financial sector collapse, the weakening of the US dollar and the recession in the US. The task of linking value chain analysis to the issue of financialization is complicated by data limitations. In particular, while lead firm profit data are readily available, precise measures of these firms’ reliance on imports within global value chains are not public. Information on costs and revenues of supplier firms in many low-income countries are difficult to trace.2 Supplier market structures have not been widely measured. As a result, in this paper I use a number of proxy measures to identify the links between global value chains and financialization. Nonetheless, the picture suggests a strong link between governance of global value chains and the dynamics of corporate governance in the case of the US since the mid-1980s.