ABSTRACT
Capitalist accumulation is motivated by the pursuit of profit. The profit rate is one of the most important indicators that help to determine the performance of a capitalist economy. Immanuel Wallerstein argued that as the capitalist world system developed, wage costs, taxation cost, and material costs had tended to rise in the core capitalist countries, reducing the capitalist profit relative to economic output. The long-term tendencies towards rising costs and falling profits would eventually result in a structural crisis that could no longer be resolved within the existing historical system. Both the British and the American economy experienced several major declines of the profit rate during the twentieth century. In the 1970s, both economies had profit rate substantially that in the early twentieth century. The rise of profit share in the neoliberal era mainly reflects the fall of the labor income share. The profit share depends on the labor income share, taxation cost share, and capital consumption share.
