Recently, many studies investigate the relationship between financialization and macroeconomic performance by way of empirical and theoretical analysis. The existing literature has especially focused on the US economy in which the financialization has been developed gradually and explicitly, and showed that the financialization has a negative impact on the aggregate demand and the labor share. This paper considers the industrial sectors in the Japanese economy, and investigates the degree of the financialization and its impact on the capital accumulation rate. First, the current paper considers the evolution of the representative macroeconomic variables that may concern the financialization. Second, an investment function that takes the effects of financialization into consideration is presented, by which this study econometrically analyzes the relationship between financialization and capital accumulation patterns of manufacture sector, non-manufacture sector, and all industries. On the basis of these, this paper examines the degree and some characteristics of the financialization in the Japanese economy, and its relationship with capital accumulation patterns. The results in this paper show that the financialization of the Japanese economy is quite limited phenomenon. For example, we cannot explicitly see a gradual increase in investment in the financial assets, financial payouts and financial incomes in the industrial sectors. These facts make a sharp contrast with the US economy. In addition, by means of econometric analysis, this paper also shows that the capital accumulation pattern of the Japanese industrial sectors is not largely affected by the variables that may concern the financialization. While the capital accumulation stagnated after the collapse of the bubble economy, the financial payouts and the financial incomes have also shown an overall decrease during the same period. That is, even when the financial variables decreased, the capital accumulation also stagnated. The recovery of the capital accumulation since the beginning of the 2000s began with improvement in the profit rate and the value added, and reduction in the debt-capital ratio. To summarize, the slowdown of the capital accumulation in the Japanese economy is not the slowdown with financialization like the US economy, but the slowdown without financialization. It is determined especially by the real variables such as profit rate and value added.
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