Labor Value and Exploitation in the Global Economy

Taiji Hagiwara

A chapter in Return of Marxian Macro-Dynamics in East Asia, 2017, vol. 32, pp 15-37 from Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Abstract: This paper discusses labor value and the rate of exploitation in the global economy using international input–output tables. Labor value is defined as the multiplication of the labor coefficient and Leontief inverse. Exploitation means that the amount of labor embodied in the received wage commodity is less than the amount of the labor actually sold. Therefore, the Fundamental Marxian Theorem, which states that the conditions for the existence of profit and those for the existence of exploitation are the same, should be modified to stipulate that the existence of profit requires exploitation in at least one country. In other words, exploitation may not exist in some countries (non-exploitation). In the context of international input–output tables, we introduce the concept of global labor value, which is the vector of embodied labor in various countries. In the empirical study using an international input–output table, we find that (1) there are non-exploitation cases in several countries. (2) During the time period 1995–2009, the rate of exploitation increased in Asian countries, namely China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, whereas the advanced countries other than Asia faced a decreased rate of exploitation.

Keywords: Exploitation; global economy; input–output tables; Fundamental Marxian Theorem; labor value (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (text/html)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... 1-723020170000032003
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:rpeczz:s0161-723020170000032003

DOI: 10.1108/S0161-723020170000032003

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Research in Political Economy from Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emerald Support ().