The Relationship Between Saving, Profit Rates and Business Cycles

Abstract

There are different approaches of economics schools on the sources, causes and determinants of business cycles. These approaches have been shaped in the Classical and Keynesian currents. The Global Financial Crisis that lived in 2008 laid the groundwork for the revival of the literature on business cycles. By using the panel data methods for the period between 1990 and 2013 in OECD economies, this study has investigated the effects of private sector profit and savings rates playing an important role in creating the cyclical fluctuations. The findings show that profit and the lagged saving rates have positive effect on the cyclical fluctuations. In other words, an increase in profit and savings rates causes the upward deviations from the trend level. On the other hand, the increases in the variables used in the analysis, like commercial and financial openness, total factor productivity, high-tech exports, domestic credit volume, M2 money supply, real exchange rate and government spendings, give rise to upward deviations tendency to boom) from the trend level while interest, inflation and unemployment rates have a reverse situation (tendency to recession).