The Historical Materialism conference took place in November 2023 at SOAS in London. 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 Rishabh Kumar from UMass Boston. The paper is still under review, so I am unable to share the full version yet. But I would like to share the abstract and the slides of my presentation at the HM conference. The slides contain an appendix with the figures and tables from the latest version of the paper.

Abstract

We assess Marx’s hypotheses about capitalist development on a global scale by constructing a new dataset of Marxist variables (profit rates, exploitation rates, composition of capital, and shares of productive activity) for 43 major economies, derived from world input-output data and national accounts in the 2000-2014 period. Consistent with Marx’s hypotheses, the average profit rate declines at the world level, between countries, and within countries. The global rate of exploitation increases until 2008 but stagnates after the financial crisis, while capital intensity continued to increase. At the cross-country level, rich countries became increasingly dominated by unproductive activity. China absorbed much of the world’s productive activity and kept the labor share of value added roughly constant at the world level.

Was Marx Right? Development and Exploitation in 43 Countries, 2000-2014 [Historical Materialism conference in London, UK] (November 2023)

In September 2023 I presented the previous version of this same paper at the IIPPE conference, which took place at the Rey Juan Carlos university (URJC) in Madrid. If you are interested, this version still had the robustness checks across four different productive-unproductive classifications of industries. The purpose was to demonstrate that our results are not sensitive to differences in the classification of productive and unproductive activities.

Was Marx Right? Development and Exploitation in 43 Countries, 2000-2014 [IIPPE conference in Madrid, Spain] (September 2023)

For those of you who can understand Portuguese, I also have a webinar recording posted on YouTube. It is a lengthy lecture. In case you are interested, here is the link:

Marx Estava Certo? Desenvolvimento e Exploração em 43 Países, 2000-2014 (in Portuguese) [August 2023]

.

.

.