This paper provides an innovative axiomatic analysis of the notion of exploitation as the unequal exchange of labour, focusing on the relation between exploitation and profits. General convex economies with heterogeneous agents endowed with unequal amounts of physical and human capital are...

This paper develops a classical-Marxian macroeconomic model to examine the growth and distributional consequences of education. First, the role of education in skill formation is considered and it is shown that an expansion in education will promote growth and have beneficial distributional...

We analyse the issue of justice in the allocation of resources across generations. Our starting point is that if all generations have a claim to natural resources, then each generation should be entitled to exercise veto power on the unpalatable choices of the other generations. We analyse this...

This paper analyzes labor productivity and the law of decreasing labor content (LDLC) originally formulated by Farjoun and Machover (1983). First, it is shown that the standard measures of labor productivity may be rather misleading, owing to their emphasis on monetary aggregates. Instead, the...

In a recent contribution on this journal, Matsuo (2009) has provided an interesting argument to refute the Generalised Commodity Exploitation Theorem (GCET), by highlighting a potential asymmetry between labour and other commodities. In this paper, a novel characterisation of the relation...

In the standard Okishio-Morishima approach, the existence of profits is proved to be equivalent to the exploitation of labour. Yet, it can also be proved that the existence of profits is equivalent to the ‘exploitation’ of any good. Labour and commodity exploitation are just different...

In this paper we review recent developments in axiomatic studies of Marxian exploitation theory. First, given the acute controversy over the formal definition of exploitation during the 1970-1990s, we review the study of the axiomatic framework, which identifies some fundamental properties -...

This paper develops a framework to analyse imperialistic international relations and the dynamics of international exploitation. A new measure of unequal exchange across borders is proposed which captures the territorial structure of imperialistic international relations: wealthy nations are net...

In this paper we review recent developments in axiomatic studies of Marxian exploitation theory. First, given the acute controversy over the formal definition of exploitation during the 1970-1990s, we review the study of the axiomatic framework, which identifies some fundamental properties -...

This paper analyses the theoretical issues related to the measurement of labour content in the context of general technologies with heterogeneous labour. A novel axiomatic framework is used in order to formulate the key properties of the notion of labour content and analyse its theoretical...