Firm Profitability, Ownership Structures, and Financial Hierarchy in a Dependent Economy: An Empirical Analysis of Peru (1993–2022)

This paper examines the determinants of firm-level profitability in Peru from 1993 to 2022 through a Post-Keynesian, structuralist, and subordinate financialisation lens. Using a panel dataset of 134 non-financial firms, it explores how profitability — measured by return on assets and return on equity — is conditioned by both firm-specific factors and the broader macro-financial environment. Methodologically, the analysis combines pooled OLS estimations with fixed-effects and GMM robustness checks in order to assess both baseline profitability drivers and ownership- and sector-specific heterogeneity. The findings show that profitability is strongly influenced by financial segmentation, while exchange-rate exposure, ownership structure, and sectoral position shape firms’ differentiated resilience within a partially dollarised, commodity-dependent economy operating under a profit-led but externally constrained growth regime. Larger and foreign-owned firms display greater resilience, whereas domestic private firms are more constrained by limited credit access and greater financial fragility. Taken together, the results support a Kaleckian interpretation of profit formation under structural constraint, consistent with recent work on financial hierarchy and subordinate financialisation in emerging economies.