Financialisation as structural change: measuring the financial content of things

In this article, we present a multi-sectoral treatment of financialisation based on input–output analysis. Our main innovation introduces financialisation as an increase in financial content per unit of output produced. In this way, we may investigate changes in relative importance of financial activities, taking into account direct and indirect interactions among sectors. Although methods focusing on the disaggregation of input–output tables have been largely explored in past decades, they have received limited attention in the literature on financialisation. We aim to refocus on multi-sectoral issues by offering a simple structure of analysis to assess the interconnections between the real and financial sides of the economy. Using a 15 and 14-sector level of aggregation, we study the experiences of the United States and Brazil for the period 1947–2015 and 1995–2011, respectively.