Financialisation of Non-Financial Corporations in South Africa: An integrated framework to study variations across sectors, value chains and firms

Financialisation shapes the ways in which middle-income countries and their non-financial corporations integrate into global supply chains and the global financial system. This integration in turn shapes the ways in which these corporations engage with financialisation. To unpack these dynamics, we advance an integrated analytical framework to explore specific sources and processes of financialisation that emerge and operate across micro, meso and macro levels. First, we adopt different concepts of rents to unpack variegated sources of financialisation related to the firm’s investment and financial activities, their value chain position, market structure, and political economy contexts. Second, we articulate financialisation processes specific to the middle-income country context through which rents are extracted. We apply our framework to three case studies of non-financial corporations in South Africa, a middle-income country undergoing premature deindustrialisation and financialisation. The selected corporations operate in different sectors and occupy different positions within their respective supply chains: Sasol in chemicals, Shoprite in retail, and MTN in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) services. Our integrated framework reveals highly heterogeneous sources and processes of financialisation which intersect at the three different levels.