Value And Unequal Exchange In International Trade

Contrary to the claims made by neoliberal governments and mainstream academics, this book argues that the huge increase in trade in recent decades has not made the world a fairer place: instead, the age of globalization has become a time of mass migration caused by increasing global inequality. The theory of unequal exchange challenges the free trade doctrine, claiming that transfers of value from poorer to richer countries are hidden behind apparently equivalent market transactions. Following a critical review of the existing approaches, the book proposes a general theory of unequal exchange in the light of an innovative reconstruction of Marx’s international law of value, in which money and exchange rates play a crucial role in decoupling value captured from value produced by different countries, even in perfectly competitive world markets. On this theoretical basis, the book provides an empirical analysis of the international transfers of value in both traditional trade and Global Value Chains. The resulting world mapping of unequal exchange shows the geographical hierarchy of capital global exploitation by revealing a world divided into two quite separate camps of donor and receiving countries, the former being the poorer countries and the latter the richer countries. This book is addressed to scholars and students of economics and social sciences, as well as activists of the North and the South, interested in a better understanding of the asymmetric power relations implied in global trade. It makes a significant contribution to the literature on political economy, trade, Marxism, international relations, and economic geography.

Global Keynesianism - Unequal Exchange & Global Exploration

This comprehensive textbook, first published in 1985, on the world economic, written specifically for non-specialists, compares neo-classical, neo-Ricardian and Marxist theories and policies in international economics. Theories of trade and money, and issues such as international debt crisis, the rise of the newly industrializing countries and the demands for a New International Economic Order, and explained clearly and concisely. A wide range of political economics across the political spectrum are discussed. This accessible book will be of interest to anyone who wants to make sense of the complexities of international economy and the competing theories on trade, money and crisis.

The doctrine of "free trade" is second only to that of "free markets" in undergirding ideological support for our current global economic structures and rules. From David Ricardo’s "comparative advantage principle" to James Meade’s Neoclassical or mainstream economics proof of self-adjusting free trade equilibrium, the free trade doctrine has had a lasting and destructive hold on Neoclassical economic thinking since its inception. The Global Free Trade Error provides a detailed analysis of these foundational models and counter-poses these to alternative Neo-Marxist "unequal exchange" models of global trade and finance. In the first part of the book the three core free trade models alluded to above are respectively demonstrated to be: overdetermined, inapplicable, and infeasible. In particular, Ricardo’s parable is shown to support managed trade rather than free trade as Ricardo and two centuries of economic texts have claimed. In the second part of the book, unequal exchange analyses of global trade are shown to provide logically coherent and useful insights into global trade and finance. In the third and final part of the book, this unequal exchange perspective is used, within a general "demand and cost" setting, to develop a set of global managed trade principles for a more equitable and sustainable world trade regime. This book will be of great interest to those who study political economy, history of economic thought, and international trade, including trade agreements and tariffs.