A stakeholder perspective of value creation versus value destruction under financialization: The cases of Bayer and Merck compared during 2000–2022

Abstract

Our political economy-based focus is on the value created within the non-financial corporation (NFC) under financialization, so that our interest is in productive value, not shareholder value (SHV). Indeed, we see both productive value generation and distributional conflict between stakeholders, as being particularly relevant to the case of Big Pharma. Here, arguably extraction and sometimes destruction of such value created (VC) are decided by the relative power of the various stakeholders. In this proposed methodology, we define and operationalize these concepts, tracking the development of such competing stakeholder claims on VC. We compare our resultant stakeholder-based and value-focused analysis of the Cash Flow statements of two German Big Pharma firms, Bayer and Merck, to others in the existing literature. Finally, we outline the theoretical and practical advantages of our proposal with its new metrics and argue that it provides an alternative highly necessary perspective contesting SHV-based approaches under financialization.