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The article reviews debates concerning financialization in South Korea, with a focus on ongoing arguments between liberal, post-Keynesian, institutionalist and Marxist economists. It argues that post-Keynesian and institutionalist perspectives in particular neglect important class processes through which the financial circuit operates within the Korean economy, especially the power of Korea’s large, family-led conglomerates, or chaebol. In order to build upon Marxist approaches to Korean finance, we argue that Nitzen and Bichler’s approach to the ‘capitalization’ of capitalist class power provides a useful heuristic for understanding the differential power of Korean chaebol and their integration into global capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a seminal paper on Marxian business cycle theory, Goodwin (1967) presented a model which assumed that a higher wage share leads to lower investment and thus a general economic slowdown. In contrast Kalecki (1971) was arguing that a higher wage share would have an expansionary effect because the consumption propensity out of wage income is higher than that out of profit income. Based on a general model that allows for wage-led as well as profit-led demand regimes, this paper estimates the effects of a change in the wage share on aggregate private domestic demand with quarterly data for 12 OECD countries.JEL classification: E11, E12, E20, E22, E25 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]