The 2023 STOREP annual conference took place on June 15-17th in Bari, Italy. At the conference I presented the latest version of my paper “Was Marx Right? Development and Exploitation in 43 Countries, 2000-2014“, co-authored with my colleague Rishabh Kumar from UMass Boston.

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Abstract of our paper:

The period 2000-2014 encapsulates a unique moment of intense globalization where nearly all countries followed the capitalist mode of production. We assess Marx’s hypotheses about capitalist development and the tendency for profit rates to decline for this period using a newly constructed dataset of Marxist variables (profit rates, exploitation, composition of capital and shares of productive activity) for 43 major economies, derived from world input-output data and national accounts. We find a decline in the world rate of profit measured using Marxist definitions. After the 2008 financial crises, the rate of surplus value stagnated but capital intensity continued to increase. Our results hold across a range of specifications about what constitutes productive economic activity in the classical framework. At a cross-country level, rich countries became increasingly dominated by unproductive activity. China absorbed much of the world’s share of productive activity and kept the labor share constant at the world level. The Marxist rate of profit on total capital declines with per-capita GDP and the rate of surplus value (exploitation) is higher in countries with a higher share of productive economic activity.

Key words: Economic development, Marx, productive and unproductive activities, rate of profit, rate of surplus value, world economy, globalization

Click here to download the slides of my presentation at the 2023 STOREP conference.

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