On Wed, 1 Oct 1997, Gerald Levy wrote:
> A question I have been thinking about related to this thread:
>
> * How can one make meaningful empirical statements regarding the
> re-distribution of surplus-value (with or without a "shift-share
> index") if one is only looking at data for an individual capitalist
> economy? I.e. unless we have accurate data for all markets within the
> world capitalist economy, how can we trace the international movement
> of surplus-value?
Jerry if you ignore surplus transferences between countries you are
introducing an error to your measure of value-price correspondence. There
are many other sources of error: conversion from complex labor to simple
labor, the problem of unproductive labor, etc. Hence, the principal
problem is not measuring without error the correspondence between labor
values and prices (because it is impossible) but analysing the importance
of such errors. By example, for the US economy during the sixties with
international trade of 30f GDP it seems that surplus tranferences was
not important for analysing the value-price correspondence.
Un saludo
Alejandro Valle Baeza