| This dissertation consists of three independent essays on structuralist macroeconomics. The first essay analyzes the relation between effective demand and growth in a one-sector model of capitalist economies, showing under what conditions demand-led growth is stable, as well as how it impacts on supply constraints and income distribution. The analysis is purely theoretical and it surveys the different ways one can “close” a one sector-model based on the classical principle of social conflict and the Keynesian principle of effective demand. The second essay investigates the distributive and demand closures of the US economy. Using quarterly data, it estimates a group of VAR models for alternative measures of the labor share of income and the global rate of capacity utilization in the US economy. The results point to a “Marxian profit-led” economy, that is, an economy in which capacity utilization is negatively related with lagged values of the labor share (profit-led) and where the labor share is positively related with lagged values of capacity utilization (Marxian, after Marx's reserve-army hypothesis). In addition to this, the VAR results also point to a “predator-prey” system with the labor share as the predator and capacity utilization as the prey. The third essay analyzes the relation between international liquidity and growth in small open economies. Defining the former as the ratio of foreign reserves to foreign debt, it presents a dynamic accounting model connecting international liquidity with growth, and then it checks whether the results of such a model hold up for Brazil in 1966–2000. The econometric results indicate that changes in international liquidity explains approximately 9% of the variation in Brazil's growth rate, which is consistent with the original hypothesis that small open economies tend to be liquidity constrained. |
