Concepts and drivers of uneven (and combined) development in space (synchrony) and time (diachrony)

Michael Dunford

Chapter 1 in Rethinking Uneven Development, 2026, pp 13-52 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter outlines and illustrates concepts of uneven and combined development. Analytically, the starting point is human beings – their needs, human productive activity, the accumulation of capital and human knowledge, the division of labour, and the uneven synchronic and diachronic development of the forces and relations of production. As soon as industrial capitalism was the dominant mode of production, the central drivers of uneven development (and structural trade and payments deficits and surpluses) were the immanent laws of a volatile competitive capitalist system, conceived in light of classical political economy, Marx and Schumpeter as the dynamics of investment in products and processes, comparative productive efficiency, relative costs of production, real competition, market share, the concentration and centralisation of capital, and circular and cumulative causation. All of these mechanisms are associated with self-reinforcing centripetal and centrifugal forces whose relative weight shapes the uneven course of development. Theories of regulation are also outlined as they afford an interpretation of successive structural transformations in a series of crisis-punctuated waves of capitalist development.

Keywords: Uneven Development; Uneven and Combined Development; Global Inequality; Secular Trends; Kondratiev Cycles; Capitalism; Marx; Schumpeter (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035352968
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