Can you break down into the broad NIPA categories of financial and non-financial?
I see that financial profits have been a progressively greater proportion of profits of domestic industries, at last count reaching 35%. Not only greater proportion, but also greater volume, while the volume of non-financial profits shrunk after 1997, with manufacturing shrinking by one-half, bulk of the shrinkage coming in durable goods which shrank by 9/10's over the 1998-2002 period.
Meanwhile, connecting back (?) to the earlier discussion, profits from rest of the world now amount to over 1/5 (peaking at 1/4 in 2000) of total profits, having trended upwards over the last 15 years. Do you have the breakdowns by region, industry? Your p.156 has multinational investments seeing lowered rates of return -- is that only FDI you are referring to?
Finally, on productivity, I came across the following from a paper by Martin Feldstein: "Before going further, I should stress the need for caution in interpreting such productivity statistics. Much of the measured change in productivity reflects estimated improvements in product quality rather than increases in the number of physical units of output."
Is that last sentence true -- i.e. much of it is est improvements in quality?
kj khoo