Complex systems may be a useful methodological tool to address "challenges for research in development". There is a huge and growing literature on complex systems and economic theory that might be related to early intuitions of classical economists on the workings of capitalist economies....

Neoliberalism eviscerated the value-sharing ethos of the post-war Golden Age (1945-73), seeking to maintain social cohesion in civil society by 'managing the discontent of the losers'. This involved reconciling working households to the realities of the neoliberal labour market by means of...

A vision of universalised human freedom, equality, security and democracy emerged in the wake of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, the British Industrial Revolution, and the French Revolution. This vision, not even approximately practicable at the time, is now well within reach. A...

This paper is a revised version of a discussion with Nobel laureate Vernon Smith on the limits of neoclassical theory and on the opportunity to recover the alternative approach of classical economists and Marx. Vernon Smith is certainly right to insist on the heuristic force of the classical...

This paper develops a simple theoretical model to analyze Marx's theory of ground rent. Using the model, I demonstrate two important results. First, if we take capital as exogenous, then total ground-rent can be decomposed into the three components: differential rent of the first variety (DRI),...

Attempts to use commodities to construct theories of value and use such value theory to claim that, in capitalism, commodities can be exploited, just like labour is, rest on two conceptual aws: (a) failure to distinguish between labour and labour-power; and (b) failure to distinguish...

In this paper we present estimates of the world profit rate using country-level data from the Extended Penn World Table 7.0 and industry-level data from the World Input Output Database. The country-aggregated world profit rate series spans the period from 1960 to 2019, and the...

The various social and economic crises triggered by COVID-19 have revealed and reflected the many forms of contradictions, interdependencies and power asymmetries that underpin our current form of globalised capitalism. While Comparative Capitalisms approaches can provide useful insights into...

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in the controversies surrounding capital theory. At the heart of these debates are the empirically observed near-linearities in the price-rate of profit and wage rate of profit curves. This article posits that these near-linearities can be...

The present work investigates the links between Ricardian and Sraffian economic analyses and the emerging themes of ecological macroeconomics, namely the impact of global warming and ecological or natural crises, the depletion of non-produced material resources, and the energy transition. The...