Una crítica al sistema mundial de salarios

Existe la creencia generalizada de que las diferencias internacionales de salarios se deben a las distintas productividades. Esa opinión ha sido cuestionada por diversos economistas. Por ejemplo, Samir Amín observó: “Los trabajadores de la periferia son super-explotados... porque la diferencia en sus salarios (e ingresos no laborables en general) es mucho mayor que la diferencia que registran sus productividades.” (Amín 1990, Capítulo 6). Para otros como Prebisch, Singer y Myrdal, “los aumentos de productividad que se obtienen en las naciones desarrolladas, son trasladados a sus trabajadores en forma de salarios e ingresos más altos, mientras que aquellos aumentos obtenidos en la periferia sólo se reflejan en forma de menores precios” (Salvatore 1987: 273). Me propongo agregar algunas reflexiones personales sobre el asunto. Mis observaciones están influenciadas por la crítica a los salarios desde el feminismo, la cual ha establecido que las diferencias de salario entre los sexos son causadas frecuentemente por razones de discriminación, antes que de productividad. Dentro de esta orden de ideas, la tesis de este artículo es que las diferencias internacionales de salarios se deben en gran parte a la discriminación antes que a las diferencias de productividad

Brexit, the four freedoms and the indivisibility dogma

The EU's position in the Brexit negotiations is based on the premise that the four freedoms of the single market - goods, capital, services, and labour - are indivisible. Wilhelm Kohler and Gernot Müller (University of Tübingen) argue that this indivisibility claim has no economic foundations, and that negotiating on this premise risks unnecessary harm. Reintroducing trade barriers will inflict damage on both sides ..

Estratificación global del desempleo y del subempleo

El artículo presenta estimativos estadísticos relacionados con la estratificación del desempleo y del subempleo. Existen listados regionales del desempleo en la literatura, pero la información agregada regionalmente no revela cabalmente la estratificación global centro-periferia que existe con respecto a los mercados laborales. En este artículo, los países son organizados en términos de quintiles del PIB per cápita. Para cada quintil de naciones se presentan los estimativos del desempleo, el subempleo, la actividad económica femenina y el empleo infantil. Los datos fuente no están tan completos como sería deseable; sin embargo, ellos permiten estimar ciertas cifras plausibles, los cuales muestran la magnitud de la estratificación global con respecto al desempleo y el subempleo

GLOBAL KEYNESIANISM AND BEYOND

Something like "global Keynesianism" or "transnational socialism" has been mentioned as a desirable alternative to global neoliberalism (Redmond 1997). However, a definition of this kind of global Keynesianism is hard to find. Many leftists tend to associate Keynesianism with corporate power. However, there are also numerous other leftists who view this differently. For example, a member of parliament for the German Green Party stated in a recent interview that "a reformist party today has to be a left-Keynesian party which contradicts the logic of capital" (Ebermann 1998). A number of scholars from several countries, including Canada, pursue post-Keynesian-ism, in the sense of left-Keynesian economics (e.g., Seccareccia 1991). How-ever, available left-Keynesian literature, as I see it, is lacking a world-system perspective. I am trying in this article to synthesize the two perspectives-namely, left-Keynesianism and world-system theory, leading to a perspective of global left-Keynesianism. This leftist global Keynesianism can, perhaps, be described as an approach to economics which emphasizes responsible public management of economic problems in a world-system context. Common themes in global Keynesianism include the importance of public management, democratic politics, the mixed economy, global income distribution, the management of global demand, investment and money, ecological sustainability and the importance of multiple levels of public management-local, national, regional and global

Risk sharing in currency unions: The migration channel

Country-specific business cycle fluctuations are potentially very costly for member states of currency unions because they lack monetary autonomy. The actual costs depend on the extent to which consumption is shielded from these fluctuations and thus on the extent of risk sharing across member states. The literature to date has focused on financial and credit markets as well as on transfer schemes as channels of risk sharing. In this paper, we show how the standard approach to quantify risk sharing can be extended to account for migration as an additional channel of cross-country risk sharing. In theory, migration should play a key role when it comes to insulating per capita consumption from aggregate fluctuations, and our estimates show that it does so indeed for US states, but not for the members of the Euro area (EA). Consistent with these results, we also present survey evidence which shows that migration rates are about 20 times higher in the US. Lastly, we find, in line with earlier work, that risk sharing is generally much more limited across EA members

A CRITIQUE OF THE GLOBAL WAGE SYSTEM

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THE STRUCTURE OF GLOBAL MONEY and World Tables of Unequal Exchange

This study takes a global view of money. The term "global money" is appearing in recent discussions (Bellofiore 1997) and there is the occasional literature reference to "world money" (Marx 1992: 190). My thesis in this article is that money has a global structure. Stated more precisely, I am contending that (1) the value of money is non-homogeneous throughout the world system (even after exchange rates have been taken into account); that (2) the currencies of low-incomc countries tend to be undervalued, not overvalued as many economists claim; that (3) the exchange rate system is one of the mechanisms by which high-wage countries extract value from low-wage countries; and that ( 4) this situation contributes significantly to unequal exchange between periphery and center countries