Relative mortality improvements as a marker of socio-economic inequality across the developing world, 1990-2009

Using cross country regressions, this paper constructs a novel distance-to-frontier metric for tracking broad socio-onomic inequality (including access of the poor to health infrastructure) over time for individual countries. Given the unavailability of reliable and consistent direct measures of inequality for most poor countries, especially related to non-income aspects of living standards, the metric developed in this paper can be used as an alternative indirect measure that is intuitive and easy to compute. To highlight its potential use, the metric is used to rank countries in terms of improvements in socio-economic inequality for the period since 1990. Notable examples of poor performance are displayed by China, Thailand, Kenya and India. JEL Categories: I14, O57, I32.life expectancy at birth, Preston regression, socio-economic inequality

Financialization, Household Credit and Economic Slowdown in the U.S.

Three important features of the U.S. economy during the neoliberal era since the mid-1970shave been: (a) growing financialization, (b) increasing household debt, and (c) stagnant real wages for production and nonsupervisory workers. This paper develops a discrete-time Marxian circuit of capital model to analyze the links between these three features and economic slowdown. The discrete-time model is used to address two important theoretical issues of general interest to the heterodox economic tradition: profit-led versus wage-led growth, and the growth-reducing impact of non-production credit. First, it is demonstrated that both profitled and wage-led growth regimes can be accommodated within the Marxian circuit of capital model. Second, it is demonstrated that the steady-state growth rate of a capitalist economy is negatively related to the share of consumption credit in total net credit, when the total credit is large to begin with. Bringing these two results together, the paper demonstrates that the three characteristics of the U.S economy under neoliberalism can have a growth-reducing impact on a capitalist economy. Hence, this paper oers a novel explanation, rooted in Marx’s analysis of the circuits of capital, of the slowdown of the U.S. economy during the neoliberal period.

This paper uses aggregate-level data, as well as case-studies, to trace the evolution of some key structural features of the Indian economy, relating both to the agricultural and the informal industrial sector. These aggregate trends are used to infer: (a) the dominant relations of production under which the vast majority of the Indian working people labour, and (b) the predominant ways in which the surplus labour of the direct producers is appropriated by the dominant classes. This summary account is meant to inform and link up with on-going attempts at radically restructuring Indian society. JEL Categories: B24, B51

relations of production, modes of surplus extraction, India

Does the Steindl-Dutt Investment Function Rule Out Profit-Led Expansion?

Bhaduri and Marglin (1990) had argued that an investment function which has the profit rate and the capacity utilization rates as the two determinants of investment imposes unwarranted restrictions on the macroeconomic model and rules out profit-led expansion. In this paper, I show that this critique only holds in a closed economy model. In an open economy model, such an investment function does not rule out profit-led expansion. I argue that the problem was less in the investment function itself than in the larger model within which it was embedded, in particular the saving behavior of the macroeconomy entailed by the model

A Marxist Theory of Rent

This paper offers a unified analytical treatment of Marx’s theory of rent. I highlight the key role played by the price of the agricultural commodity in determining rent. I offer two closures of the model. The first closure is an elaboration of Marx’s argument in Volume III of Capital. The second closure explicitly allows for the role of demand. I also show that total rent can be decomposed into three components: absolute rent, differential rent I, and differential rent II. A Marxist theory can explain rent in any system of capitalist commodity production which uses privately owned nonreproducible resources

Exploitation of Labour or Exploitation of Commodities?

Attempts to use commodities to construct theories of value and use such value theory to claim that, in capitalism, commodities can be exploited, just like labour is, rest on two conceptual flaws: (a) failure to distinguish between labour and labour-power; and (b) failure to distinguish labour-power and other commodities. One way to avoid these conceptual mistakes is to use the labour theory of value

Relations of Production and Modes of Surplus Extraction in India

This paper uses aggregate-level data, as well as case-studies, to trace out the evolution of some key structural features of the Indian economy, relating both to the agricultural and the informal industrial sector. These aggregate trends are used to infer: (a) the dominant relations of production under which the vast majority of the Indian working people labour, and (b) the predominant ways in which the surplus labour of the direct producers is appropriated by the dominant classes. This summary account is meant to inform and link up with on-going attempts at radically restructuring Indian society. JEL Categories: B24, B51relations of production, forms of surplus extraction, mode of production, India

A Unified Marxist Approach to Accumulation and Crisis in Capitalist Economies

An economic crisis in capitalism is a deep and prolonged interruption of the economy-wide circuit of capital. Crises emerge from within the logic of capitalism’s operation, and are manifestations of the inherently contradictory process of capital accumulation. The Marxist tradition conceptualizes two types of crisis tendencies in capitalism: a crisis of deficient surplus value and a crisis of excess surplus value. Two mechanisms that become important in crises of deficient surplus value are the rising organic composition of capital and the profit squeeze; two mechanisms that are salient in crisis of excess surplus value are problems of insufficient aggregate demand and increased financial fragility. This paper offers a synthetic and synoptic account of the Marxist literature on capitalist economic crises

Bias-Adjusted Treatment Effects Under Equal Selection

In a recent contribution, Oster (2019) has proposed a method to generate bounds on treatment effects in the presence of unobservable confounders. The method can only be implemented if a crucial problem of non-uniqueness is addressed. In this paper I demonstrate that one of the proposed methods to address non-uniqueness that relies on computing bias-adjusted treatment effects under the assumption of equal selection on observables and unobservables, is problematic on several counts. First, additional assumptions, which cannot be justified on theoretical grounds, are needed to ensure a unique solution; second, the method will not work when estimate of the treatment effect declines with the addition of controls; and third, the solution, and therefore conclusions about bias, can change dramatically if we deviate from equal selection even by a small magnitude

Capital, Non-Capital and Transformative Politics in Contemporary India

Kalyal Sanayal’s work on postcolonial capitalism has been influential in many strands of critical social theory. In this brief note, I investigate three key components of his argument and find them wanting. In particular, I show that the evolution of land ownership in India does not support the claim that the primitive accumulation of capital is one of the important processes in operation in contemporary India. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that the process of primitive accumulation has been arrested or significantly slowed down. In addition to the critical comments on Sanyal (2007), I indicate towards an alternative framework that is better able to explain the key features of contemporary India