[OPE] "lies, damned lies, and underconsumptionist statistics"

One of the things I've been trying to verify more, is the thesis of "dollar
imperialism".

Henry C.K. Liu argues for example:

Finance globalization is an illegitimate child of dollar hegemony, which
forces all nations that accept foreign credit to emphasize low-wage export
to earn dollars to repay dollar-denominated loans. Under such circumstances,
export keeps domestic wages low while it ships real wealth overseas in
exchange of dollars that cannot be used in the domestic economy.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/HE27Cb01.html

If that is true, then (simplifying) we might expect that the value of US
domestic physical capital stock (and durables) grows significantly faster
than we would expect from domestic net capital formation data. There would
be a net addition to the domestic capital stock (and durables) which is not
attributable to domestic net capital formation. But in fact the discrepancy
is not so great as I thought, and the empirical hypothesis I had is not so
welltaken anyway, insofar as a large share of US imports consists of raw
materials and consumables. Main components of foreign trade are:

1) Imports and exports of goods and services
2) Imports and exports of currency and liquid funds
3) Imports and exports of capital assets and financial claims
4) Imports and exports of people
5) Imports and exports of communications

The physicalist theory of value argues that value is lodged in physical
goods only. But in Marx's theory, economic value is the representation of
worktime, and that is a different story.

The input-output data is no longer so very useful because:

- the organisational structure of enterprises has changed. The sectorization
is rather "artificial" nowadays.
- the capital structure of enterprises has changed

Most Marxist theories of world trade are dumb if you properly consider the
data.

J.

_______________________________________________
ope mailing list
ope@lists.csuchico.edu
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/ope
Received on Sun Sep 26 04:05:09 2010