Ricardo’s Theory of Value is Still Alive and Well in Contemporary Capitalism

The purpose of this article is, on the one hand, to shed light on some significant aspects of Ricardo's theory of value and on the other hand to show that Ricardo's insights about the explanatory power of the relative labour times on the movement of relative prices were in the right direction. For this purpose, Ricardo's theory of value is cast rigorously and in modern terms such that by using detailed intertemporal data from input-output tables of two major economies to show that Ricardo's insights are absolutely consistent with the facts.